


come away o human child

by enbyofdionysus



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fae & Fairies, M/M, alternative supernatural, or irish american gothic idk, spooky towns, suburban american gothic, there's some gory descriptions in here toward the end sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2018-08-28 22:15:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 35
Words: 39,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8465002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enbyofdionysus/pseuds/enbyofdionysus
Summary: Greenwood, NY was known for its lack of everything: a lack of natural disasters, a lack of entertainment, and most of all a lack of population. And so when teenagers begin to go missing it sparks the entire town's interest, especially that of Jason Grace whose sister has been acting out since their mother's unexpected death. But it's only when his best friend, Percy Jackson, finds something neither of them were expecting that the truth of their town's fresh horrors comes to light.





	1. Prologue

Thalia Grace was going to die.

Her nostrils were filled with the smell of wet dirt, her face half covered in it. Uknown hands dragged her sagging body across the ground. Tree roots snagged on her hair and cut her face. Everything was black, but Thalia didn't need to see to know where she was: she knew she would end up here eventually.

Still, she tried to twist her body to see the face of her assailant, to try to catch their eye. In the faint moonlight between the trees, she caught sight of short hair. “Luke,” she guessed. “Luke, please.”

But whether it was really Luke or not didn't seem to matter. Because one moment Thalia was tasting the floor of the woods where she had helped drag five others just like herself and the next she saw it: the clearing. Fear threaded its thorny fingers across her skin.

“No,” Thalia croaked.

She tried to feel for anything in the mud that might give her some leverage: a tree root, a branch, the tip of a rock buried deep in the ground. But there was nothing. The clearing grew closer.

“ _Please._ ”

The mud turned gravelly with small stones and vacant weeds. The person dragging her feet let them drop. Thalia hissed.

“Get her head.”

If there had been any hope of surviving, it died with the sound of Bryce's voice. Thalia took a shuddering breath, then another and another. Someone moved around her to her shoulders. They lifted her again, but slower this time. Thalia no longer tried to appeal to their humanity. How many times had she done this same thing? Instead, she looked for the stones.

 _It isn't murder_ , Bryce had said, his fingers carding through her hair. _It's more like a trade_. _A life for a life_.

The earth grabbed for Thalia again and this time she saw the stones. They stared at her with their hideous swirls. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the balls of light, twisted fireflies writhing through the trees. A week ago they had awed her, excited her. Now, bile crept low in her throat.

Thalia tore her eyes from the trees and up toward the stars.

There were none.

And then the chanting began.


	2. one night earlier

Jason Grace wanted to die.

He turned the keys in the ignition of the sad metal box that was his mom's station wagon and sagged back against the driver's seat. The car smelled like his uniform and his uniform smelled like stale coffee and sweat. His name tag dangled precariously from his lapel from where he'd halfheartedly attempted to separate himself from the work day.

Jason closed his eyes. Sighed. Opened his eyes. The night sky loomed above his house, starless and quiet, and the tiny, one-story ranch stared back at him through the windshield in a challenge. Jason noted that the house was dark, which meant Thalia, once again, wasn't home. He could hear Jupiter yipping from the other side of the front door.

“God,” Jason muttered as he slid from the car, “damn it.”

He slammed the door and shuffled toward the porch, his arms folded tight across his chest in the October chill.

“Jupiter,” Jason called. Vapor ghosted from his mouth. “Calm down.”

The dog's barking turned sharp with excitement.

Jason slid his hands across his back pocket for his key and jumped when his phone vibrated instead. He ignored it and unlocked the door. Immediately, Jupiter – a black lab with a half-sunken eye – spilled out onto the porch and against Jason's legs.

Jason patted his side and then nudged him off. “Alright, man, go pee,” he said.

The dog lumbered off into the dark of the vacant yard. Jason squinted after him and then reached back for his phone. The name on the screen wasn't Thalia's, but an unknown number. Jason's stomach twisted; his sister was usually home by now. He hit the 'redial' button at the same time that his mind supplied images of Thalia and her new cult friends spray painting the old Smith Church. He ran his fingers through his hair and glanced inside the house where his mom's urn sat, a dark shadow perched on the kitchen counter surrounded by tiny figurines and picture frames.

“Hey.”

Jason tore his eyes away, his heart steadying. “Percy?”

“The one and only.”

“What happened to your phone?”

“I had to get a new number 'cause Dr. Ryan blocked me.”

Jason rolled his eyes, but felt himself smile. He leaned back against the door frame and watched Jupiter sniff around the yard. “So what's up?”

“How do you feel about an adventure?”

“I just got out of work.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“Percy.”

“This time will be different, I promise.”

Jason shook his head and moved inside the house, turning on the front hall light as he went. “How?” he asked. He still had healing scars from the last time Percy had called him out for an Adventure, which really, was Percy's code for hunting cryptids. There had been one Bigfoot sighting in the dull town of Greenwood, NY some twenty years ago and Percy refused to let it go. His trailer, parked out on a tiny crop of land some five miles away, was covered in newspaper clippings and plants all in a passion for biology both proven and unproven. Jason's mom had called it obsessive, but Jason called it endearing.

Percy said, “I found something.”

Jason glanced at the door at the _tic-tic_ of Jupiter's paws on the linoleum. “What is it?” he asked. “If it's more crayfish, I swear to God.”

“That's just it,” said Percy. “I don't know. I've been through these woods a million times--”

“Do you know how creepy that sounds?”

“You got me, I'm the Greenwood killer.”

Jason shuddered at the memory of the news reel: _the third missing teen in a series of weeks, taken straight from the local High School--_ “Har har.”

“Anyway, I've been through these woods a million times and my EMF reader is always a constant 1.5 or lower. But when I was gathering some moss samples for my paper for Dr. Ryan's, it spiked.”

“I'm not ghost hunting.”

“ _Jason_.”

“Percy, I'm tired.”

“Please?”

Jason closed his eyes. Sighed. Opened them. “How high was the spike?”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is unedited so I'm sorry if you catch any mistakes! Also, I changed Octavian to Bryce

Here was the thing: Greenwood, NY was known for its lack of everything – its lack of natural disasters, its lack of entertainment, and most of all its lack of population. Jason's High School class had been made up of fifty people, half of who ended up commuting to the local community college once they'd graduated.

Nothing ever happened in Greenwood. Which was why it was so strange when something did. That something being the disappearance of Sadie O'Hara. At first, it had seemed like Sadie had disappeared the way many small town girls disappear: with their parents' money and a bus ticket to New York City. But when police found one of her shoes by the side of the path leading away from the High School, her disappearance took on an entirely different meaning. Greenwood had had runaways before. What tiny town in the middle of nowhere hadn't? But a kidnapper? A killer?

The news had the town's hackles raised. Theories were thrown around: human trafficking, a serial murderer. “Sasquatch,” Percy had supplied. Whispers of the Greenwood Killer were everywhere. But eventually they were silenced by Sadie herself who, after a week, returned miraculously unharmed to her house. Police interviewed her to no avail: Sadie O'Hara had no recollection of what had happened to her. Drugs, people said. Alcohol, said others. “Aliens,” said Percy.

After another week, the town had gone back to its usual monotony, the memory of Sadie's disappearance just that: a memory. But luckily for Greenwood, the excitement wouldn't be short lived. Because thirteen days after Sadie's reappearance, Jason received a call in his dorm room informing him that his mother had been the victim of a hit and run.

And everything went to shit.

Suddenly there was a funeral to pay for – “A cremation would be better,” the nurse at the hospital had said with a wince. “We can't make her look... We can't... She wouldn't look like herself. There was just too much--” – and a mortgage to pay for and a sister who was still in school. College was suddenly something laughable. Life was suddenly laughable. But while Jason crushed his emotions into a tiny ball in his chest and threw himself into work, Thalia released hers in the form of staying out late at night doing who knew what with a group of people Jason nearly considered a gang.

Nothing good came of a pack of brats run by Bryce Lawrence: local miscreant and overall dick cheese. Jason hadn’t trusted him since he made their sign language teacher cry in 10th grade and for good reason: he oozed arrogance, drunk on privilege and high on the life that that privilege offered him. It wasn’t because of the money that Jason didn’t trust rich people, but because of their reckless attitude. He didn’t want to see Thalia, whooping in a drag race, end up smeared across Main St like–

“Dude,” Percy said, shining his flashlight across Jason’s eyes. “You okay?”

Jason swore and squinted, swatting at the light. Percy laughed. “Fine. Where’s the spot?”

Percy grinned and looked up at the starless sky. The woods were disturbingly quiet save for the occasional owl, but it didn’t seem to frighten Percy: king of the wild. He’d been exploring the same patch of trees since Jason first met him three years ago and his ease amongst them – just another finger on the dark hands reaching up toward the smoky clouds – made Jason feel at least a little less anxious. “Close,” he said. He glanced down at Jupiter who panted laboriously beside Jason’s calves; Jason hadn’t wanted to leave him home alone. “I’m not burying your dog out here if he dies.”

“He’s not going to die,” Jason said.

Jupiter wheezed.

Percy nodded as if it were the dog’s response that he was waiting for, not Jason’s, and started forward again. Leaves, dried and discolored with patches of orange and brown, crunched beneath their feet. Jason watched Percy’s EMF reader flicker from 0.5 to 0.7 and back again if only to distract himself from the faint spice of Percy’s cologne. There was the faint bubbling sound of a creek, but Percy avoided the direction from which it came and took a sharp left off the path.

Jason followed him and Jupiter after Jason until the earth became a little steeper, steeper still, and then evened out.

“Where–?” Jason began, then stopped when Percy turned to him with that feverish look in his eyes, the same one he made when he had two dollars left in his bank account on Taco Tuesday.

Percy lifted the EMF reader, which glared fiercely red in the dark: 4.5.

“What the fuck,” whispered Jason.

“The fuck,” Percy said, “is right.”

Jason took the EMF reader and stared down at it. “What the fuck,” he said again.

“The fuck,” Percy said again, this time victoriously, “is _right_.” He stepped forward onto a path between the trees Jason didn’t remember seeing before, his fanny-pack thumping against his hip with the weight of his equipment. “I thought maybe limestone was the cause or, like, iron or some shit, but what’s the likelihood of finding either of those here?”

“Pretty rare,” Jason admitted, feeling his inner geek climbing to the surface.

“Exactly,” Percy said. “So I have a theory.”

“Of course you do.”

“First Sadie, then Michael, then Destiny, Tyler, and Marcus.”

Jason frowned. “Percy.”

“You can’t tell me it’s a coincidence that all five went missing and now there’s an energy spike in the area. Fucking– aliens, man, come on.”

“Percy, they all came back home.”

“With no memory of what happened.”

“Percy. This isn’t– Please don’t. Not with this.”

Percy stopped walking. Jason couldn’t see his face and, in the gray of the moonlight between the smoky clouds, for a moment Jason had to remind himself that this was his best friend, not a stranger in the woods. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just mean that maybe you shouldn’t incorporate real life people into your– theories.”

Percy’s form straightened. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Jason suddenly became aware that he had quietly and unknown to himself dug his own grave. “Just that– I mean, yeah, your stuff has evidence to back it up and– But maybe you should keep it to yourself so, you know, you don’t offend the parents or anything. Not everyone believes in aliens, Percy.”

“Not everyone?” Percy accused. “Or not you?”

Jason didn’t answer.

“You’re the one who came, Jason.” Percy turned back around, his flashlight clicking on into the night as he stomped away. “Blame it on friendship or whatever, but you came. So don’t go thinking I’m the only one crazy h–” Percy cut himself off with a curse and suddenly the place he had been standing contained the form of no one at all.

“ _Percy?_ ” Jason hurried forward, but Percy quickly snapped at him to stop, stop, stop.

“There’s a drop,” Percy said from somewhere below. “A hill or something. This– I don’t know what this is.”

Jason carefully felt his way forward, his left hand on Jupiter’s collar and his right on the EMF reader. The device started to beep sharply, the numbers creeping higher before dying just as Jason reached where Percy had fallen. Jason called down for him.

“I’m here,” Percy said. “Watch for the mud.”

Jason slid down what was, as Percy described, a steep hill before coming to a halt beside his friend. He showed him the dead EMF reader. Percy frowned at it, then frowned still when Jupiter began to bark. And bark and bark and bark.

“Jupiter,” Jason hissed. “Be quiet.”

The dog was not quiet.

Percy swept his flashlight across the ground. There were no trees. “This is new,” he said.

Jason shoved his fists into his jacket, shuddering. He would have to scrape the mud from his work shoes. “New as in newly discovered?”

“No,” Percy said. He walked forward.

Jupiter kept barking.

He swept the flashlight across the ground like a metal detector, walking five feet, then ten feet, then fifteen, twenty. At twenty-five, he turned to Jason and called out “It’s a clearing.”

“What do you mean a clearing?” Jason asked. He followed after him, uneasy at Jupiter’s excitement, but not willing to turn back just yet.

“Look at the ground,” Percy said. “There aren’t any plants here.”

Jason glanced at his feet, then looked hard at them. There was no grass, no sticks. Just dirt. And not the kind that was rowed for cropping. It was uneven and untended as if it had been there for years. A circle of dead earth.

And then something caught Jason’s eye.

“What,” he asked, “is that?”

A pile of stones, large and small, had been placed some distance away from Jason in what looked like an oval some six feet long. He walked towards it, curiosity trumping danger, and eyed the swirls on their surface. “Is that... What is that?”

“Looks Celtic,” Percy said, making Jason jump; he hadn’t noticed him following.

“What’s a Celtic rock formation doing out here?”

Percy shook his head and shined his flashlight a little further out into the field. “I don’t know,” he said. “But there’s another one over there.”

“And there,” Jason said, pointing to another clump of rocks only a few feet away.

“And there,” added Percy, stepping back.

“And...”

There were five.

Jason looked at Percy, his breath crawling up and around him like a ghost.

Percy looked back at him, his eyes awry. “Still think I’m crazy?” he asked.

The flashlight died.


	4. DID THEY???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these chapters are usually pretty short because I tend to write in short bursts and don't have the patience to wait until I have a full actual chapter length to submit, so I hope you guys are okay with that

Percy swore and smacked his flashlight. “Energy drain,” he said. He flipped the light over and looked at it, then lifted his head and stared out at the clearing. “These are fresh batteries.”

“I don't like this,” muttered Jason. Jupiter was still barking from the top of the hill.

He crouched down to the first ring of stones he'd seen. Percy had been right when he said they looked Celtic, but there was something off about them. The swirls and knots were different than the ones Jason had seen on Percy's right forearm, the kind that intersected in thick black lines like a shield. These were almost chaotic, etched without rhythm. Jason reached forward to get a closer look, but Percy's hand on his shoulder stilled him.

“Don't,” Percy said. “You don't know what those are.”

“They're rocks.”

“Rocks that are somehow draining our batteries and giving off an electro-magnetic spike,” Percy argued. “If it's something spiritual then feel free to disbelieve all you want, but if it's something radioactive then have fun dying of cancer.”

Jason pulled back his hand. He stood. “What are you thinking?”

Percy's lips thinned. “That matters to you now?”

“It always matters to me,” Jason said tightly. He shoved his hands back into his pockets. “Sometimes you just get... Passionate about the wrong things.”

“Just because I get excited about aliens and shit doesn't mean I'm excited about people getting hurt.”

Jason sagged. “I know.”

Percy stared at him, his green eyes like storms even in the heart of darkness. Finally, he said, “I think we should call the police.”

His answer made Jason startle. Percy hated everything to do with the police, partially because the Greenwood Police Department had barely looked into the case of Percy's own missing mother three years ago, but mostly because his own brother – Triton Jackson – was a deputy. The two did not get along.

“There's five formations,” Percy said. His brown face was turned down in a scowl that others often thought meant trouble, but Jason knew meant he was thinking. “And the way these stones are moved looks nothing natural or supernatural.”

“Nothing– What do you mean nothing supernatural? You said it yourself–”

“The energy seems supernatural. This,” Percy gestured to the rocks, “seems man-made. I'm starting to think we might have found a dumping ground.”

“For what? Percy, the kids came back.”

“Did they?”

“What– _Yes_.”

Percy's face looked serious, but his eyes were wild. “I have a shovel,” he said suddenly. “Out at the car.”

Jason blanched. “Percy, no.”

“Then we call the police.”

Jason ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Percy.”

“Jason.”

Jason sighed again and looked into Percy's face. All at once he was aware of how close they were, aware of the sharp angles of Percy's features and the delicate flare of his nostrils. Jason wrenched his eyes away. “Fine. We'll call the police. Otherwise,” he said, “have fun dying of cancer.”

 


	5. percy u creppy mutherfuck

By the time they emerged from the trees Jason had lost feeling in his hands. The familiar smell of dead leaves had been replaced by the sharp bite of frost. Their cars looked abandoned in the dark lot and, as they approached, Jason swept his eyes across the shaded windows of his station wagon for anything, or anyone, out of place.

Jason felt on edge since leaving the clearing, but Percy didn’t seem bothered much aside from his unusual silence. He was a strange thing in his element of strange things. Jason watched as he yanked the back door of his work van open and hastily replaced the batteries of his flashlight. Jason asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Percy’s face suddenly illuminated and for the first time in forty minutes Jason felt at ease in his presence. “Call the station,” Percy said and, with a hideous metal shriek, shut the van’s door. “You should have reception now. I’d do it myself, but they don’t accept my calls.”

Jason’s hand stilled on his back pocket. Jupiter wheezed impatiently beside him. “They can’t do that,” he said.

“And yet,” said Percy dismissively. He pulled open the side door of his van and, on cue, Jupiter trotted immediately after him in a source of warmth. Percy helped the old dog up onto the blankets scattered across the metal floor where equipment sat either broken or protected in black cases. Jupiter easily found his place amongst them.

Jason watched silently, waiting for any other explanation. Percy didn’t give one, but sat on the cold floor beside Jupiter. He met Jason’s eyes. Held them.

Jason swore and took out his phone. “We’re talking about this later,” he said. He shuffled toward the van and sat on the other side of the open door. The station picked up on the second ring and, as Jason quickly described his location and the rock formations he had found, something low in his gut began to curdle.

The officer on the other line told him someone would be along to check out the woods, but as Jason met Percy’s eyes he got the strange feeling that they had made a mistake. He couldn’t think of why or how he knew, but as soon as his thumb pressed ‘end,’ that uneasy feeling he’d gotten in the clearing had returned.

“Should we stay?” Jason asked. He didn’t voice his worries, chalking it up to mere anxiety.

Percy shook his head. “We’ve been out here for too long.” He nodded toward Jason’s jacket. “You’ll get hypothermia. Besides, if they have anything to ask they have your number.”

Jason nodded and stood up, tucking his phone back into his jeans and burying his hands once again into his pockets. “What about you?” he asked. “Do you want to come over or something?” He asked partially because of the fear of driving home alone, partially because Percy’s van didn’t have heat, and partially because of the idea of being home alone with Percy for the first time in ages made his nerves thrum.

But Percy shook his head. “I have work in the morning,” he said.

Jason chewed his lip and nodded once.

“But,” he amended, “maybe tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Percy smiled. “Thanks for coming out.”

“Thanks for leading me to a murderer’s dumping ground.”

“I thought it wasn’t a dumping ground?”

“It’s definitely something.”

“Yeah,” Percy agreed and his eyes did something odd in the glow of the flashlight. “Definitely something.”

“Text me when you get home,” Jason said. He nodded to Jupiter who huffed and clambered up off his nest of blankets.

“You too,” Percy said. But he made no move to leave. Even after Jason fist-bumped him and hurried to his own car, even after Jupiter hobbled to the back seat and managed to climb in, after the station wagon coughed and struggled awake, after the heat sputtered on, after the wheels dragged across the dirt and gravel as Jason pulled out and away – Percy sat still, his green eyes trailing after Jason’s taillights. Only after Jason made the turn down the road away from the woods did he see Percy get up to leave in his rearview mirror. And yet he didn’t go to the driver’s side of his van.

But back toward the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [cute momentary fluff followed by the ominous sound of cellos]


	6. lots of trees

Jason's foot fell onto the break. He stared in his rear-view mirror. Then turned his body to stare out the back window. “What the fuck?”

Jupiter stared back at him, panting.

Percy did not re-emerge.

“What the _fuck_."

Jason grabbed for his stick-shift and yanked it back, the station wagon chugging into reverse until it nearly crashed into Percy's van. He tore off his seat belt and pulled himself from the car. Jason stared off into the woods for several minutes, expecting to see Percy come out with a series of plant samples he couldn't have left without. But when Percy still didn't come back to his car after ten minutes, Jason reached into his station wagon and cranked the window down a couple of inches.

“Stay here,” he said.

Jupiter did not reply.

Jason grabbed his phone from his back pocket and found his flashlight app, shining it before disappearing into the trees. Only after he realized his phone was at 15% did he realize this may not have been a good idea after all. Jason didn't know these woods like Percy did. How easy would it be for him to walk into the darkness and never come out again? How easy would it be for someone to grab him and place him under those Celtic stones? How easy would it be for Jason to be walking and not notice the cold until he was like that man in the Jack London story that had so terrified him as a child?

Jason's phone died.

“Shit,” he hastily announced to the trees.

He smacked it, hoping that it was possibly an energy drain like the flashlight and the EMF detector rather than mere battery use. Leaves crunched. Jason sighed.

Then froze.

Something was moving a little ways away from him.

Jason waited, gauging the source of the sound: _crrrch, crrrrrch, crrrrch_. And then he slid as carefully as he could behind the large maple tree on his left. A spider skittered over his hand. Jason shook it off. The crunching became louder. Someone was speaking in a muffled voice. Jason strained his eyes to see, but even as they adapted to the faint moonlight he could only make out a couple of shapes. The voices became louder and for a moment Jason thought he recognized one of them. He leaned forward to hear.

“– almost finished.”

“But what's the point? Don't we already have enough?”

The first voice snorted. “You've seen them. They won't be appeased with only–”

Jason slid himself further around the tree in an attempt to hear over the leaves.

“Let me do the thinking,” the first voice said. “After this, we'll have more power than you could ever–”

Jason slipped.

A root snapped.

The voices stopped.

Jason held his breath.

The wind set the trees ablaze with crackling laughter and for a split, terrifying second Jason couldn't hear anything. And then the first voice, to Jason's left, whispered.

“ _I see you_."

Jason exploded from his spot and tore into the trees, not paying attention to where he was going, to where he was stepping, to whether he was going in circles or into the depths of his own grave. He could hear feet thundering after him accompanied by loud, wild laughter – raving maenads come to tear him apart. He made it nearly a quarter mile when someone grabbed him and yanked him to the right.

Jason yelped, but his voice was quickly muffled by a rough hand.

“Quiet,” hissed a voice in his ear.

And this time Jason recognized the speaker.

He immediately sagged against his assailant, but his eyes wildly searched the dark. Sticks cracked wildly as the dark figures trampled past the bush in which Percy had pulled Jason and together they listened until the sound faded, faded, and then was gone.

Percy removed his hand from Jason's mouth.

Jason shuddered against him.

And then shoved his fist back into Percy's stomach.

Percy swore.

“What the fuck,” Jason hissed. “Percy, _what the fuck!_ "

“Why are you here?” Percy snapped back. His eyes flickered across the trees and then back to Jason's face. “I thought you left!”

“And you were _supposed_ to leave. What happened to having to work in the morning?”

“I needed to come back.”

“To what? Murder people?”

“Is that what you think of me?”

“Well, it's kind of hard not to when you disappear into the _fucking woods_ to come back to a _dumping ground_.”

“You said it wasn't a dumping ground.” Percy shoved him off into the underbrush. “Are you telling me you didn't feel that? That pull back towards the stones?”

“No,” Jason snapped. “Because unlike you, I don't have a _boner_ for _aliens_."

Percy rolled his eyes and looked off into the distance of the runners. Jason watched his face and for a moment forgot his anger. He followed Percy's eyes. “Do you know who those people were?” he whispered.

Percy shook his head. Then reached down for Jason's hand.

Jason took it and pulled himself up, the warmth of Percy's palm radiating through each individual finger. “Maybe,” he said, “they were just assholes.”

Percy frowned down at their hands. “I think,” he said, “I prefer aliens.”

“Do you think it's safe to head back?”

“Only one way to find out,” Percy said.

He led the way through the trees, somehow finding the steps with the softer leaves so he barely made a sound, a deer and a hunter in one body. The adrenaline kept Jason's ears sharp for the owners of the voices he'd heard, but it also made him hyper-aware that Percy hadn't let go of his hand. If he moved his pinky just right he could feel the scar from where Percy slit the heel on a rock while hunting for crayfish.

A light flashed across the trees.

Percy stopped.

Voices swam to them on the wind.

Jason's fingers tightened around Percy's.

They locked eyes.

And ran.

 


	7. oh snap

Jason’s blood was loud in his ears.

Sticks and roots stretched up from their muddy graves to grab at his ankles, to tear at his skin. Percy’s hand was hot in his, sweaty but tight in grip. Voices grew louder behind them and somewhere there was the bark of a dog much larger than Jupiter. Fear dragged its cold nails across the low of Jason's spine.

There was no way they could outrun them.

Lights, sharper than any bullet, shot across the trees. Someone shouted directly behind them. And then in front. A flashlight came from nowhere, blinding Percy and Jason both before the end of it came down just as quickly across Percy's face. Percy fell to the ground. Jason shouted. The man in front of them shouted back, “I said _freeze!_ ”

Jason froze.

Percy coughed from the ground.

“Christ,” the cop said. “Jackson, is that you?”

Percy slurred a curse at him.

“Jesus,” said the cop. He waved his flashlight so Jason could see his sweating and pink-tinged face. “Yo, Tri! Over here!”

The dog-barking got louder until Jason caught sight of a policewoman with a German shepherd. A couple of other officers emerged with her, among them the familiar face of one Triton Jackson. If Percy was a puck among the trees, then Triton was Oberon. His face was fierce not because he was thinking, but because he was fierce; Percy's eyes were the color of waves on a summer day, Triton's of waves that silently pulled children down and down and down. Jason tried not to shrink when he approached.

“It's your brother,” the first cop said. He shined his flashlight down on Percy's face. Percy squinted up at him, his nose painted with blood.

“Of course it is,” said Triton. He didn't offer Percy a hand, but instead asked the other cop, “What happened to his face?”

“Punched him,” admitted the cop. “I was in pursuit.”

“You hit him with your flashlight,” Jason spat.

“I was in pursuit,” the cop said again.

Triton looked unconcerned. He stared down at his brother. “This another one of your prank phone calls?” he asked.

Percy shoved himself to his feet. He swayed. And then steadied himself. “They weren't pranks.”

“Is this,” asked Triton, “another one – of your – prank – phone – calls?”

Percy opened his mouth to say something Jason was sure would be foul when he hastily announced, “We found something.”

Triton turned his steely eyes to him. “You found something,” he said.

“We found something,” Jason said again. “In a clearing. Just over that way. We thought it looked suspicious, which is why we called you.” He licked his lips and cast an eye across the other officers. “Obviously you thought it must have been suspicious too,” he said, “or else you wouldn't be here.”

“We have more important things to investigate than rocks,” Triton said. “We're here because we received a call from a girl claiming to have witnessed a murder.”

Jason's blood went cold. He shot a glance at Percy, but Percy was staring at Triton.

“What do you mean a murder?” Percy asked.

“He means,” said the first cop and shined his light back in Percy's eyes, “you two better have an impressive alibi. Because you're under arrest.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry these chapters are so short!


	8. another metaphor about percy being one with the woods

“No,” Triton said, “they're not.”

The first cop shot him a confused look. “They're not?”

Triton spared him a glance. “We don't have a just cause. It was a girl who made the call. Besides, we haven't found anything except for these two and I know for a fact that Percy comes here because of his compulsions. It would be suspicious for him _not_ to be here.” He turned off his flashlight and became just another black mass in the night. “What I want to know,” he said, “is if you two heard anything.”

“We told we you,” said Jason. He took a step forward in front of Percy whose nose was still bleeding. “We _found_ something.”

The black shadow that was Triton was silent. And then said, “Fine. Lead the way then.”

Jason licked his lips and finally looked at Percy.

Percy looked back.

The question of the two figures they'd seen flashed between their eyes. And went unanswered. Percy turned back toward the trees. “It's this way.”

 **

The night had turned frigid as Percy led them along the familiar path toward the clearing. Jason’s hands were buried deep in his jacket pockets, but it didn’t do much good. He could still feel the sweat of Percy’s palm on his. He flexed his fingers.

Leaves crackled and crunched beneath the heaviness of their steps. The German shepherd beside Jason snuffled. And then there was the sound of the creek bubbling on their right, the tall oak tree among the maples. Percy took a left. Triton followed, his flashlight a hellish beacon.

Percy had yet to wipe the blood from his face – maybe, Jason thought, to prove a point to his brother – and the dark trail of it from his nose to the collar of his coat made Jason grimace every time he looked his way. But Percy hadn’t spared him a glance since he’d moved. His eyes were focused on the dark ground, on the species of trees and plants around him.

The ground dipped and Percy’s head tilted up. “It’s here,” he said and slid down the muddy slope. The police followed after him carefully. “There’s a drop,” Percy said, “just up here. Be careful.”

Jason watched him as he led the way across the now-level ground. He walked five feet, ten feet. The dip in the earth wasn’t that far much ahead. The memory of Percy’s sudden disappearance was still fresh in Jason’s mind.

But Percy didn’t fall.

Didn’t drop.

He walked twenty feet, thirty feet, hesitantly feeling the ground with his converse. Finally, he turned, his face twisted in the sharp glow of Triton’s flashlight. “I don’t understand,” Percy said.

“Maybe you took a wrong turn,” Jason suggested. But that was impossible and Jason knew it. He may as well have asked Adam if he was in the wrong Eden.

Triton didn’t look surprised, though. He had yet to lower his light from Percy’s face. “I think it’s time,” he said, “that you two went home.”

Percy’s face was a mix of rage and anguish. “Triton,” he said, “Triton, it was here. It was here, I swear.”

“And so were the men, right?” Triton asked. His voice was steel.

Percy flinched.

“And the car. And the masks. And now the stones.”

“Triton,” Jason interrupted. “I saw it. There was a clear–”

Triton whirled on him, flashlight blinding. “Do _not_ ,” he snapped, “feed into my brother’s hallucinations.”

“They’re not–”

“Every night is the same. Men in ski masks, men in black, men in an SUV, men with guns. Do you know it’s a federal crime to make a false report? Do you know how many times I’ve been out here because of Percy’s _episodes_?”

“They’re not episodes!” Percy shouted. “They were real. They had mom!”

“Mom _left_ ,” Triton spat, “because her life was being _crushed_ by trying to support an adult _child_. There are no men. There are no stones. There is no clearing.”

“There was–”

“For once in your life, Percy, _shut up_.”

Percy bit his lip.

Triton stared into his face. “I will not let you make a joke of my unit. Go home. Take your medication. And for the love of god, stop showing up at the college. Dr. Ryan is going to issue a restraining order.”

 He turned on his heel and motioned for the others to follow. The German shepherd made a low wining sound and barked sharply when its handler tried to make it move. “Come on,” the policewoman mumbled and gave a tug to the leash. Finally, the dog moved, leaving Percy and Jason standing alone at the bottom of the slope.


	9. i've been listening to ariana grande's side to side for like an hour

“Percy,” Jason said. “Percy, slow down.”

Percy did not slow down. Leaves threw themselves from his feet. By the time Jason had managed to pull himself from the trees, Percy had already made it to his van. He wrenched the driver's seat door open and threw himself inside, slamming the door immediately after him. Jupiter barked excitedly from the back of the station wagon.

Jason watched, shivering, as Percy cranked the keys in his ignition. The van's lights flashed on. The engine rumbled and rattled. And then shuttered off. Jason heard Percy swear.

He turned the keys again.

The van spluttered.

Percy swore.

Turned the keys.

Swore.

Turned.

Swore.

Swore.

Swore.

Jason swallowed and helplessly stared as Percy thrashed at the steering wheel, a silent horror film behind the dusty windshield. For once Jason was glad there were no air bags. Finally, once Percy stopped moving, he made his way to the driver's side and pulled at the handle. The door groaned and creaked.

“Percy,” Jason said. And then said again, softer, “Percy.”

Percy did not look at him. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

Jason's hand itched to touch his shoulder. He leaned against the door frame instead. “It was there,” he tried. “I saw it too. You're not...” He trailed off and waited for Percy to reply, but there was nothing. The wind whipped at his hair, hushing through the trees. Jason was unnerved by the silence, but unnerved more by the shaking of Percy's shoulders.

Jason licked his lips. His hands fidgeted in his pockets. Jupiter had stopped barking. “Percy?”

Percy still didn't meet his eyes. He shoved the back of his hand over his cheeks.

Jason treaded carefully. “What did Triton mean about... hallucinations?”

It was the wrong question. The look Percy threw him was feral.

“They weren't,” he snarled, “hallucinations.”

“Okay,” Jason amended.

Percy stared at him before sagging back against the seat. He ran his fingers over the rubber band on his left wrist. “They're delusions.”

Jason shifted his feet. He couldn't tell if his legs were warm or if he'd lost feeling in them. “I didn't know there was a difference.”

Percy ran his fingers through his hair. “It's... I don't see things. I remember them.” He gestured in front of himself as if to explain and then shrugged instead. Jason waited. Percy said, “I was there. The night my mom went missing.”

“It was here in the woods,” Jason guessed.

Percy swiped his tongue across his lips. The blood on them made Jason ill. “I come here to try and find her.”

“Oh,” Jason said. And then, “I thought you came here to hunt cryptids.”

“I do,” Percy said. “It's all connected.”

Jason suddenly felt uncomfortable. Percy seemed to sense it and glanced his way. “The stones,” he reminded him. “You saw the stones.”

“The clearing,” Jason added.

“The voices,” Percy whispered.

They shuddered together.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Jason asked, leaning closer into the door. He could smell the faded spice of Percy's cologne; it made him warm.

Percy raised his eyebrows. “That I'm batshit?”

“That you have PTSD.”

Percy stared at him, then out towards the woods. Jason followed his gaze, but something told him Percy was seeing something he would never be able to see. “The same reason,” Percy said, “that you never told me about yours.”

Jason frowned. “I don't have it.”

Percy gave him a look.

Jason scowled. “I don't.”

“Take me to the store then.”

“Fine.”

“Without taking back roads.”

Jason's jacket was suddenly fifty degrees too hot. He tightened his hands into fists in his pockets. “Fine,” he said.

Percy stared at him.

Jason stared back.

“Take me home,” Percy finally said in a small, defeated voice. He slid from the van. After a moment he added, “Please.”

Jason nodded once and led the way to the station wagon. His eyes slid from Percy's back to the woods one last time, Triton's words echoing in his head: A murder. _A murder_.

Jupiter yipped wildly at Jason's addition to the car, snuffling his nose into the back of Percy's ear once he collapsed into the passenger seat. At the very least, it made Percy smile. Jason checked the gas, having left the car on for his dog's sake, and then pulled the stick shift back, carefully reversing. “I'll bring you back tomorrow,” he said. “Give you a jump-start.”

“Sure,” Percy said.

Jason licked his lips. His teeth found an uneven scab and tugged at it. “You don't go to school anymore,” he said. The road rumbled unevenly under his tires.

Percy scowled at him.

Jason waited.

“No,” Percy answered, but it hadn't been a question.

“For how long?”

“Couple months.”

Jason chose not to ask why, instead letting out a slow, slow exhale. He pulled away from the woods and back towards the road. “Is that why Dr. Ryan blocked your number? You've been asking her questions about your mom?”

Percy scoffed. “No.” He folded his arms across his chest, sinking a little into the seat. The trees around them thickened momentarily before becoming thinner again and more sparse. Jason waited for the familiar sight of wheat and dead grass. He noticed Percy's neck was pink.

Jason smiled. And then smiled wider. “It really is because you're a geek, isn't it.”

“Shut up.”

“Dr. Ryan,” Jason said in a bad imitation of Percy's raspy voice, “I found these baller Blue Stars that I think would make you hella wet.”

“I would never say 'hella' to a professor.”

“You would and you have.”

“Also, Blue Stars come out in May, not October.”

“Right, sorry. How stupid of me.” Jason was grinning now. “Have some Witchel instead.”

Percy laughed: a quiet, but happy sound. “It's Witchhazel.”

“Same thing. You knew what I meant.”

Jupiter gave a huff of a bark from the back seat.

“Exactly,” said Jason. Percy laughed again.

The trees faded away into the background and with them went Jason's anxiety. He glanced up at the stars ahead of them, found Orion's belt with some relief, and then looked back toward the road. And yet, in the low of his gut, he felt it: the same queasy feeling he had when he'd called the police on Percy's behalf. Like something wasn't quite right. Like they were headed in the wrong direction. Like he should turn back. Like he should–

“Jason?”

Jason blinked. He had stopped the car.

When had he stopped the car?

Percy was looking at him oddly, suspiciously. “You okay?”

Jason looked back at him: the angle of Percy's jaw, the freckle just beneath his left eye. “Yeah,” he lied.

“You sure?”

“Thought I saw a deer.”

“A deer.”

“A deer,” Jason agreed.

He started the car.

 


	10. AGH IT'S SO SHORT I'M SORRY

Percy’s house was located some two or three miles away from the woods although, in Jason’s opinion, it may as well be a part of the woods.

He had to hunt for the tire tracks of Percy’s van just to find the small path off the main road where it sat. Many houses did not sit; they stood. But Percy’s house did not exactly qualify as a house. It didn’t exactly qualify as a trailer, either, but Jason had the suspicion that the government didn’t actually know that Percy lived there.

The small, silver camper was parked out in the middle of a grassy field like an abandoned truck. The front was rusted, falling apart, and as Percy pulled himself from the station wagon Jason felt the familiar pang of guilt knowing that he had a warm home to go back to. While Jason had been thrown under the bus that was a mortgage after his mom died, Percy had been forced to move out of his apartment in only a week because he couldn’t afford the rent that was suddenly his responsibility. They were two sides of the same, grief-stricken coin of sudden adulthood and it made Jason ill.

Percy knocked on the top of the station wagon. “We should go back,” he said. “Tomorrow. And I don't mean just for the jump-start.”

Jason stared. “Triton–”

“Is full of shit,” Percy finished. “We know what we saw. And now,” he added, “there may have been a murder.”

A chill ran down Jason’s spine. He could still hear the two voices whispering. What had they said? Something about not being satisfied. Something about power. “Percy,” said Jason.. He licked his lips. “Maybe we should let the police handle this.”

Percy was undeterred. He tilted his head in that way which made Jason have to swallow twice, the one that looked like he was about to pull a screwdriver from his diaper. “I’ll bring back-up flashlights,” he said. “You’ll pick me up?”

Their eyes held, but it was a challenge Jason knew he would lose. Not because Percy was incapable of respecting his decision, but because Jason was incapable of respecting his own.

“Fine,” Jason muttered.

Percy grinned and Jason swallowed a third time. He knocked the top of the car again. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” Jason agreed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so short guys! I'm switching POVs though and I didn't want to switch in the middle of a chapter ya feel?  
> P.S. I MIGHT GO ON HIATUS WITH THIS until the end of December because I've been debating writing a Hanukkah fic, but I'm not sure yet


	11. tidings of comfort and joy

Thalia shut the door and sank against it. Her hands were still shaking.

The sweet smell of the house's air-freshener was foreign and when Jupiter didn't come to greet her with his usual snort and snuffle she felt even more unnerved. Immediately, she went for the lights. All of them. The kitchen, the living room, the closet. She could hear Jason's whiny voice in her head – _Do you pay the electricity bill?_ – and crushed it with an imaginary fist. _Things_ could hide in the dark. And for Thalia, there were a _lot_ of things.

She toed off her boots on the kitchen floor and ignored her mom's urn in favor of the sink. Her hands were clean – Bryce always made sure – but still, if Thalia wasn't looking at them straight on, it looked as if there might be blood beneath her nails. She swallowed hard as she scrubbed her fingers, the memory still fresh in her mind.

It was never meant to go this far.

Thalia was smart enough not to be fooled by Bryce's sly tongue and interesting contrast of features – her friend Annabeth might have thought that boys with dark hair and light eyes were hot, but Thalia thought they were creepy. She knew when he approached her that day behind the bridge, his breath warm with cigarette smoke, that he was going to take more than he gave. But she had gotten distracted by sea of possibilities, by the temptation of control.

“It's a just a trade,” Bryce had told her with a smile that very first night, back when the earth was warm and the trees beckoned them. Sadie O'Hara was unconscious at their feet, rope tied around her wrists and ankles. “We won't hurt her.”

Thalia didn't believe him and in response he showed her his teeth in the guise of a smile.

He said, “Watch.”

And she did.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

It was amazing every time. Impossible every time.

They would take a living person, place them in a ring of stones Bryce supplied for them, and like magic – like some kind of twisted miracle – lights would appear and take them away. And just like Bryce said, they wouldn't be hurt – Sadie had come back to school in a matter of days. It was a harmless ritual, Bryce had said. Harmless. And in exchange the lights would gift them with “immeasurable power.”

“Watch,” Bryce had whispered that night in the woods. He opened his hand, white as bone, and like Peter Pan gently lifted himself into the air.

It was unlike anything she had ever seen before.

It was enchanting.

Captivating.

Addicting.

Each trade they made granted them a new gift.

But like her mom had told her once: God giveth and God taketh away.

Thalia turned off the sink and ran her cool, wet hands over her face. Jonah, the youngest of their group at just fourteen, had wanted out. Something, he said, was off about what they were doing. Something wasn't right. Thalia had been tempted to agree with him. But Bryce wasn't.

Thalia leaned against the counter and ran her fingers through her hair. She couldn't get the image out of her head. The ferocity of Bryce's ice blue eyes. The strange, beast-like twist to his face. The way he lifted Jonah from the ground. The way Jonah's bones snapped as he was slammed into the trees again and again and–

Thalia pinched her arm.

Took a deep breath.

Then another, and another, and another.

And then, despite knowing in the back of her mind that somehow he would know, Thalia turned her face toward the other side of the kitchen counter.

Towards the phone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope this chapter is just the right amount of explain-y and not the wrong amount of explain-y!


	12. edited [finger guns]

The house was dark when Jason finally opened the door.

Jupiter pattered inside, sniffing around before disappearing off into the living room to find his bed. Jason glanced around the kitchen: the stove clock glowed a faint green; it was well after midnight. His mom's urn sat, guardian-like, on the counter. Jason avoided eye-contact with it as he slipped off his sneakers.

He tugged his coat zipper down, passing through the kitchen as he made his way to the hallway. Thalia's door was, as expected, firmly closed. He didn't bother knocking, relieved at least to see the crack of light beneath her door. Small mercies, he supposed.

Jason pushed his own door open with his foot, sagging against the frame. The idea of work in the morning physically pained him; the idea of disappointing Percy by not coming tomorrow pained him more. He shucked his coat off onto the floor and stepped around a pile of discarded books and pens. There was the faint sound of Jupiter's tags jingling in the living room.

Jason collapsed onto his bed.

“What the fuck,” he told his comforter.

He rolled over to stare up at the ceiling. Van Gogh's “Starry Night” stared back at him with its dozens of swirling eyes. “I see you,” Jason whispered to the poster.

And then, to himself, “ _I see you_.”

He squirmed on the blankets and reached for his bedside table where a cross necklace sat in a pile of its own silver chain. Jason wasn't a practicing Catholic, no one in their family was save for his grandmother, but the familiar heaviness of the symbol in his hand made him feel grounded.

A tap came at the door. Jason startled.

Thalia stood in the door frame, her hand still in a fist from knocking. She looked ghostly in the dark of the hallway, in the dark of Jason's room. Then she flicked on the light along the wall and was human again. She asked, “Can we talk?”

Jason pulled himself up. “Yeah, of course.”

Thalia stepped across his room like a minefield before pulling herself up onto his bed, sitting across from him pretzel-style. Jason couldn't remember the last time they'd talked. Really talked. Probably, he thought, just after their mom had died, when they'd discussed the arrangements for the church ceremony. Guilt gripped at his chest. Had they really been fighting for this long?

“How was work?” Thalia asked. She picked at a string on his comforter.

Jason shrugged. “It was work. How was school?”

Something crossed Thalia's face. “It was school.”

Ah, Jason thought. She hadn't gone.

He didn't touch the subject, too moved by the fact that Thalia was here, in his room, to be angry. He was so tired of being angry, so tired of trying to be a replacement. Go to school, he had told her countless times. Get a job, help with the house, clean your shit, grow up grow up grow up. “I miss you.”

Thalia pulled at her charm bracelet. “Not much to miss.”

Jason closed his eyes. Opened them. “There's enough.”

They were quiet. The wind hissed against the window panes. Finally, Thalia asked, “How far are you?”

Jason frowned, then followed her gaze to his old, clunky laptop on his old, clunky desk. “Oh,” he said. “Same as before.”

Thalia mirrored his look. “You haven't been writing?”

Jason's jaw ticked. He argued, “I haven't had much time.” But that wasn't true and they both knew it. In High School, Jason had always made time for writing his stories even with AP classes making his eyes red with sleep deprivation.

Thalia brought her eyes back to her bracelet. Her fingers twisted at a tiny silver fairy. She said, “Soon you'll have plenty of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm gonna fix things,” Thalia said. She swallowed and then looked back up at him.

Jason held her eyes. Slowly, he said, “You can't bring her back, Thal.”

Thalia's eyebrows did something complicated. “I know that. I didn't mean...” She trailed off, looking to the window as if expecting something, as if she were _waiting_ for something, to be there. “I know I've fucked up a lot. That I haven't been the greatest sister. And I know you didn't ask to come back here.”

“I would've come back either way.”

“There's a difference between coming back because of duty and coming back because you want to, Jason.” She ran her fingers through her short, spiky hair. Jason remembered when it was long, when she used to sit between their mom's knees and let her braid it. “I don't want to be your responsibility.”

Jason made a face before he could stop it. “Well, you are. You can't really change that.”

Thalia stared at him.

Jason stared back. And then her words sank in. “Thalia,” he said. “Thalia, _Jesus_ , did Bryce say something to you?”

Thalia sat up straight. Her jaw set. “Bryce has no voice in what I do.”

Jason laughed. “No voice? You trail after him like a sheep. Where did you guys go tonight? Dave Johnson's farm to make another crop circle? Break into St. Mary's to drink the communion wine?”

“God, you're so fucking–” Thalia shook her head and pulled away from him.

“Yeah?” Jason slid his legs from the bed and stood up. “I'm what? Stupid? Because I can see that something is wrong with Bryce Lawrence that you, for some reason, don't? You think you're going to run away together or something? Eating shrooms and driving off into the sunset with no responsibilities?”

Thalia scoffed and stood up too. They were the same height. “Don't talk about,” she said, “what you don't know.”

A chill ran through him. Jason held her eyes and then, quietly, asked, “What do you think is going to happen when you tell Bryce you don't want to hang out with him anymore? That's just going to let you go?”

Thalia's gaze drifted back to the window. She said, “I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.”

“Thalia.”

She turned away and left the room.

“ _Thalia_.”

In the hallway, she looked back at him. Jason didn't know her anymore. He swallowed. “Just... be careful.”

To his relief, she offered one of her small smiles. She said, “Always.”

And then disappeared back into her room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to edit this so that their conversation ended differently because I didn't like how this scene felt. I meant it to be a scene to show the relationship between Jason and Thalia at this point and it ending so fast and so abruptly didn't accomplish what I wanted it to.


	13. guess what's back!!

Jason lingered on the front porch and let the wind bite his ears. The sun hung heavy above the trees, but not heavy enough to tip the scale, and the orange glare of it through the thickness of the clouds made him squint.

He knew Thalia had left that morning – whether for school or elsewhere – not long after he'd gone to work and yet something was nagging at the back of his mind, scraping the soles of his shoes, making his thumb slide along the edge of the car key in his pocket reluctantly. He stared out at the station wagon. His phone dinged with a text message.

Finally, Jason went to the driver's side of the car. He caught Jupiter's eye in the living room window, the dog's face barely visible on the sill where he rested his chin. Jason gave a small wave before opening the door and settling into the driver's seat.

He held the steering wheel in his gloved hands and, for a brief moment, Jason allowed himself to wish his mom was there. But Jason often wished for many impossible things.

He turned the key in the ignition, feeling the familiar cough-splutter of the engine resurrecting, and then carefully pulled out onto the street. He stalled on the road, but only for a moment. The ranch stared back at him with its dark eyes. The sun would be setting soon. His phone dinged.

Jason drove.

**

“What exactly are we looking for?”

After nearly an hour, they'd managed to get Percy's van running again and now, with black grease beneath their nails, they stumbled once again through the trees – Jason with a flashlight and Percy with the EMF detector. The idea of a murder having taken place there the night before, the thought of coming back into contact with those figures, made Jason nauseous. He didn't want to be looking for a dead body.

“The clearing,” Percy said. The night prior he had walked ahead of Jason like a forest shepherd, but now he stayed beside him. Possibly because he too was anxious, possibly to make sure Jason didn't run. Jason didn't mind in any case. Percy's shoulder kept brushing accidentally against him. Jason's shoulder kept brushing accidentally back. “I want to know how it disappeared.”

An owl sang low above them and Percy imitated the noise as one would playfully mock their cat. The stars could barely see them through the thickness of the trees. Jason woefully thought of his own bed.

Percy asked, “How was work?”

The normality of the question was so strange to Jason it took him a moment to process what was being asked. “It was fine,” Jason answered and then added, “It was work.”

Percy nodded, satisfied, and Jason immediately felt a wave of self-hatred. When his mom had died, a part of him had died with her – strangled by grief and cremated by anxiety. Jason was conscious of it, saw it in the way Thalia stared at him, and he was overly paranoid that that change had also changed Percy's perception of him. He had always been the quiet one, content to let adventures be had in the books he read and the books he wrote, but never quiet enough to be awkward. Never quiet enough to be boring.

Jason stared at the EMF detector, which bleeped a monotonous heartbeat, and distantly wished, in some strange way, he was Percy. What wonderful torment it would be to have a missing parent, to be able to look for them, to cry over them, to not know what happened to them. What wonderful torment it would be to live by himself in a small trailer, his own personal sanctuary despite its lack of comfort. What wonderful torment it would be to not have to worry about his sister, to not have to be responsible for someone so irresponsible themselves, to be free, to be free, to be free.

Jason regretted the fantasy as soon as he thought it. But still, it lingered.

He gripped the flashlight. “What about you?”

Percy had been idly staring up at a pile of oak leaves. He did this often. He asked, “What?”

“How was work?”

“Oh,” Percy said, “it was shit.” He glanced at the EMF detector. “Literally. Someone's kid shat on the floor in the bathroom and Chris clocked out early so I had to clean it.” At Jason's face, he made his finger into a gun and winked. “Stay in school,” he said, because, until recently, he _had_ stayed in school.

Jason did not laugh.

They walked further into the trees, Percy listening hard for the familiar bubbling of the creek and Jason listening hard for the familiar sound of someone following them. The creek found them first and Percy took a victorious swerve to the left. Roots snapped under the force of his converse. Jason sympathized with them.

They climbed together over the dead leaves. Jason could smell rain on the wind and remembered, haphazardly, the promise of a scattered shower on the news. Then all at once Percy stopped and his hand flung over to cover Jason's chest. His palm lingered a moment too long. Percy said, “Look.”

Jason looked.

They stood over a six-foot drop, the same drop that had welcomed them terrifically the night before, the same drop that had disappeared under the heaviness of Triton's eyes. Grass grew around it, but not on it, and after the hill Jason could see a large spans of earth, a dark lifeless patch of nothingness. A thrill shuddered down Jason's spine. He looked at Percy. Percy looked back, a Prometheus with a flaming EMF detector in his hands.

“Ready?” asked Percy.

“No,” replied Jason.

They slid down the hill.

The sky was cloudy and moonless. The dead earth felt charged under Jason's feet, like it wasn't actually dead at all. He shined the flashlight around him, but saw nothing.

Percy said, “The stones,” and Jason looked up. Where there hadn't been before was now a circle of perfectly rounded stones, etched with the same jagged Celtic markings as before. Jason stared at them, as if if he looked away they would vanish. Percy walked toward it carefully, gradually. The EMF detector screamed.

Jason walked away, just a little, and found one of the other circles. It was the same width as the other one, the same length, but there was something off about it he hadn't noticed the night before. “Percy,” he called. There was the _swish-swish_ sound of a pair of jeans. Jason handed him the flashlight. “What is that?” he asked.

Percy crouched low, shining the light along one of the stones. There was something white along the edge of it, a series of tiny globs. Percy reached forward, then stopped, thinking better of it. A second later, he reached forward again with his utility knife and gently poked the white substance. It sank against the knife, but yielded no answers. Frowning, Percy pulled his hand back, then brought it forward again and swept the knife beneath the white blob as if he were polishing a fossil. When he found the edge of it, he brought the knife up and carefully lifted without force, shining the light with his other hand.

“Is that,” Jason asked, “a mushroom?”

Percy stood back up and shined the light across the stones, one by one. Tiny mushrooms ran around each one. “What the fuck,” he muttered.

They walked carefully around the clearing, dragging the flashlight across each stone circle, inspecting every jagged etching. Each circle had a ring of mushrooms. The flashlight died twice. Twice Jason replaced the batteries. “What should we do?” Jason asked. “Take one of the mushrooms? Study it?”

Percy shook his head. Instead, he took out a tiny vial and knelt down, scooping some of the soil into the glass. “This,” he said, “might be safer.” He corked the vial and placed it in the pocket of his bag. He cast another glance around the clearing. They heard no birds, no bugs.

Jason was about to suggest they leave when Percy's brow furrowed. “Hey,” he said.

Jason asked, “What?”

“How many circles were here last night?”

“What?” Jason asked again. He looked around the dirt. “Five,” he answered.

Percy pointed a little ways off in the distance. Jason followed his finger to some thirty feet away. Another circle, identical to the others, sat silently in the earth.

“Maybe we miscounted,” Jason said.

He looked at Percy.

Percy looked at Jason.

They had not miscounted.

Someone had made a sixth circle.

 


	14. the messiest eaters in the world

“ _Okay_ ,” Percy said and gestured toward Jason with his slice of pizza. “What's our game plan?”

Jason looked up, feeling cheese drop against his chin from his own slice. He asked, “Game plan?”

After finding the sixth circle of stones, they had since gathered back to their cars and escaped to Sergio's Pizza – Greenwood's only pizzeria within a ten mile radius – before burying themselves in the strange comfort of Percy's camper.

Percy spread his arms and sent pieces of sausage flying onto the floor of pillows. Behind him was a cork board covered in photos and newspaper clippings which were, in turn, covered in bits of red string connecting one image or square of text to the next. If life were a film, the shot would have cast Percy into a harsh light; if life were a Scooby Doo episode it would have been the shot that determined Percy as the Greenwood Killer. He repeated, “Game plan.”

But Jason knew Percy's “delusions,” to use Triton's word, were not in his camper. Rather, the camper was, in its own way, Percy's very soul exposed.

Every inch of its 20 x 40 ft interior was coated in photos and newspaper clippings of both cryptid animals, missing persons, and already-discovered plants and herbs. The only thing that covered them from any judging eyes were a series of tapestries. One, a soft blue color, had been hand-stitched by Percy's mother with a complicated-looking almost Bohemian pattern. The other, a dark and slightly-battered green, had belonged to Percy's father and the golden harp that sat poised in the center spoke more to Jason about his dad than Percy ever had. The rest of the camper was covered in pillows in lieu of a bed and on those pillows lay a series of audio books, a tape player, a lit lantern, and finally a cat.

Jason sat beside said cat, pizza box open on his lap for warmth (the battery-operated heater on the single shelf could only do so much work). Percy, sitting across from him, did not seem cold in the least.

“We've already called the cops,” Percy said, “so that's out of the question. The only other option is to investigate ourselves.”

“We've already investigated,” Jason said around an obnoxiously long onion. “So far we've found a part of the woods that disappears and a group of reproducing, Celtic stones. I don't think we're going to find much more.”

“But if we _did_ find much more...”

Jason groaned. Then thought. Finally, he said, “We couldn't leave a camera by the clearing – the batteries would just die.”

Percy made a finger gun at him. He said, “Exactly.”

Jason frowned. “I'm not staying out in the woods to investigate with you.”

“Why not? I do it all the time.”

“You investigate _moss_ all the time. You investigate birds, rabbits. Aliens are an entirely different class of Nope.” The intention of Jason's sentence had been to put his foot down, an attempt to keep Percy out of danger – for once – but Percy's face had lit up somewhere in the middle and Jason became distracted. “What?”

“You said aliens.”

“Oh my god.”

“So you _admit_ you think it could be aliens.”

“I–” Jason could feel himself turning pink. He took a exhaustive bite of pizza. “Whatever remains,” he said through his mouthful, “however improbable must be the truth.”

“Except it was the first thing out of your mouth aside from that sausage – gross, by the way – not what remains.” Percy pointed at him with his crust. “We'll go at dusk and stay by the trees around the hill.”

“Percy, Jesus _Christ_.”

“I'll bring my night-vision goggles and mom's gun.”

“ _No_ guns.”

“Mom's hand-gun, then.”

“No _guns_ , Percy.”

“Should we bring the infrared camera?”

Jason sighed. The cat on the pillow beside him, named Neptune, stared coolly at him. Blinked. Jason stared coolly back. Blinked. “I guess,” he conceded, “but we can't guarantee how long it'll last.”

“When do you get out of work tomorrow?”

“We're not doing this tomorrow.”

“Jason.”

“Percy.”

“Things could happen by tomorrow. A seventh circle.”

“Then an eighth might happen on the weekend after I've slept for eight hours.”

“Fine. You sleep, then. I'm going.”

Jason scoffed. “You're not going.”

“I didn't realize you were my big brother, _Jason_.”

That hit a nerve. Jason's jaw set. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'm not your sister,” Percy spat. “I get what you're trying to do, but in case you haven't noticed I'm a year older than you. I've been on my own longer. My parents have been gone for longer. So you can stop trying to take care of me because I can take care of myself.”

Jason cast his eyes back down toward Neptune. It was true: he had known Percy only for the time he had been in the camper, only for the time he had been in a feud with his brother, only for the time when Percy had been looking for his mom, never before. It wasn't that Percy had ever been careful and was now being careless, it was that Jason had once believed that nothing could hurt them and now it seemed everything could.

Chastised, he said, “I'm sorry.”

Percy's hackles visibly went down. “Thanks,” he said. Then, “We can wait until the weekend. But I need you to do something since you have a TV.”

“What's that?”

Percy finished his crust and wiped his hands across his jeans. “Watch the news for any newly missing people.” He reached out a hand and rubbed Neptune's ear. The cat's eyes closed. “If there's one part of the investigation I don't need proof of,” he said, “it's that there's a connection there.”

Jason frowned. “And if there aren't any?”

Percy didn't look deterred in the least. “There will be.”

 


	15. missing

Despite Percy’s predictions, the TV was quiet over the next few days. Jason routinely checked the News when he got home from work, his eyes scanning over any banners that crossed the screen. But it was only ever Weather Alerts for nearby counties, never for a missing person. The week had come and gone. More leaves had fallen from the maple in the back of the yard.

Really, the only suspicious thing had been the unnerving quiet of the ranch.

The night after discovering the new circle of stones with Percy, Jason had returned home to find the house dark and deserted. He thought nothing of it. How many times had Thalia come in late since their mom had died? How many nights had Thalia refused to speak to him?

_ Am I so horrible?   _ Jason had thought that night. 

Thalia’s empty room had darkened his mood, which had been light with the memory of Percy’s emphatic hands greased with pizza.

Was it so wrong to want help with the mortgage even when his sister was still in school? Was it so wrong to want to leave, to go back to college, to get a degree, to dream?

Was he killing his sister’s dreams?

Now, fresh off of work three days later, Jason tried to push the thought from his head as he shut the door behind him. Just like the day before and the day before that, the house was silent. He sighed into the empty, open air. In the living room, he heard the faint jingling sound of Jupiter scratching at his collar.

He glanced at his mom’s urn on the counter, its black surface decorated in stretches of white granite-like webbing. For a brief, guilty moment he wished his mother were alive, not to see her, but so he could have his own life back.

And then Jupiter appeared in the kitchen and he became distracted again.

It was a regular Friday night.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Jason had turned on the News as usual, running a fork through cold, leftover spaghetti as he tiredly made his way to the couch. A spring struck him as he settled onto the cushion and he winced unhappily. The couch had been there since before Jason was born and it showed. The oddly bold colored lines against the browned fabric was reminiscent of the 90s, but unpleasantly so.

Jason took a bite of the spaghetti. He glanced at Thalia’s ever-empty room.

Jupiter pulled himself up onto the couch beside him, his breathing labored, and Jason offered him a partially frozen meatball.

The News droned about potential rain storms and the growing water levels of the lake. Eventually, the News went statewide because there was nothing interesting regarding their town or neighboring cities. Jason finally changed the channel when the anchors began talking about legislation being made to help the housing market. There was a documentary on Ancient Rome on Channel 4 and, for a fortunate hour, he let himself get lost in it.

When the clock below the TV glowed ‘11:00’ Jason cast another look over at Thalia’s room. Something prickled at the back of his neck, but Jason thought tiredly that it was nothing. Still, he stood from the couch and made his way to the hallway, the dirtied tupperware empty in his hand.

Thalia’s door was partially open. Although no one was inside, Jason rapped his knuckles once, twice and then pushed the door open gently. The door swung easily, stopping just short of the wall. It was dark, but Jason expected that. He reached for the light switch.

And.

In the briefest of seconds.

Just before the light illuminated the room in a hazy, yellow light, Jason thought…

Perhaps.

Maybe.

Something was standing in the middle of Thalia’s room.

But it was impossible. Nothing had been there before and nothing could have appeared. Still, as Jason blinked in the sudden brightness, the afterimage of something blurred in Jason’s vision. 

Something with arms that weren’t quite right.

The rational part of Jason’s mind told him he was being crazy, but still he gave a whistle to Jupiter and waited until the dog trotted curiously to his side before he took a hesitant step into the room. It was strangely cold. Not the cold of spirits that Percy had energetically spoken of in the past, but the cold of emptiness.

Of a space that hadn’t been lived in.

Jason stared at Thalia’s unmade bed, at her jeans on the floor, of her empty chip bags and crumbs on the top of her dresser. How long had it been, he suddenly wondered, since he’d last seen her? 

Wednesday.

Jason suddenly felt…

Unnerved.

_ She’s fine _ , he thought as his hand went to the phone in his back pocket.  _ She’s hanging out with Bryce. With Luke. They’re drinking. She’s getting high. She’s fucking up her future. She has a future. _

His fingers were shaking as he hit a name on his contacts that he hadn’t spoken to in several months, a name he hadn’t _had_ to speak to in several months.

“Hello?”

Annabeth’s voice came over the phone, sharp and direct. Jason was suddenly very aware of how late it was. Still, Annabeth had been Thalia’s best friend since they were seven. If anyone would know where she was and what she was doing, good or bad, it was Annabeth.

“Hey,” Jason said. His voice sounded strange. Far away. He cleared his throat. “Are you with Thalia by any chance?”

“No,” said Annabeth. She wasn’t rude, just matter-of-fact. Jason had always liked at about her.  _ At least one of Thalia’s friends had their priorities straight _ . “I haven’t talked to her since last week.”

“Okay,” Jason said. Then, “Have you seen her recently?”

There was a pause. Careful. Curious.

Images of the missing kids’ faces on the News darted across Jason’s mind.

“Not since last week,” Annabeth said. Her voice wasn’t as direct this time. Cautionary. Worried.

Jason couldn’t feel his hands. He flexed them, holding one hand up to his face. But he couldn’t quite look at it. There was suddenly a realness to it that disturbed him. “Thank you,” he heard himself say.

Annabeth replied, “Let me know when you find her.”

_ When you find her _ .

The room went sideways.

He hung up the phone.

Stared at the screen.

Hit the phone button again.

Jason could have sworn his fingers dialed ‘911,’ yet when Percy’s voice came through the speaker he wasn’t surprised.

“Jason?”

“Thalia,” Jason said. He reached out for his sister’s bed to lean on, then recoiled when he suddenly remembered the wrongness of the…  _ something _ he’d seen. Was it still in the room? Had it gotten Thalia? He couldn’t think. He couldn’t feel his  _ hands _ .

“Nope,” said Percy. His light-hearted voice felt vile in Jason’s ears. “Wrong number.”

“She’s missing.”

Silence.

Then, “What?”

“She hasn’t been home. I don’t think since Wednesday. Percy. Percy, since  _ Wednesday _ .” The stones, Jason tried to say. The  _ stones _ .

He couldn’t feel his face.

Why couldn’t he feel his face?

Percy said something, but Jason didn’t hear. He stammered, “What?”

“I’m coming,” Percy said. There was a rustling sound. The night air. A car door. “I’ll get my brother. Breathe, Jason. She’s probably just out.”

Something cold pressed against Jason’s ear. Jupiter yipped at him. At some point Jason had slid to the floor. “Percy,” Jason said.

Percy repeated, “Breathe.”

“No,” Jason said. “Percy.”

“I’m here.”

“The _stones_.”

There was another beat of silence.

And then Percy said again, “I’m coming.”


	16. the ghost

“How tall is she?”

“Do you have a recent photo?”

“When did you last see her?”

“Does she have any identifiable features? Tattoos? Birthmarks?”

“Is there any chance she may have run away?”

Jason answered the questions mechanically. He felt numb and strangely alone in the kitchen despite the number of police in the house. Percy was off to one side, speaking to Triton in a low voice while his brother paid him an unusual amount of attention. It was crowded and Jason desperately wanted to step outside. He asked the policeman, a guy named Lux with elastic curls, to repeat the last question. He watched as Percy made a hand gesture to emphasize something, watched as his eyes flickered briefly to the urn on the counter and then back to Triton's face.

Lux asked again, “Is there any chance she may have run away?” His voice was measured and careful. There was nothing judging in his stare. Jason was grateful for it.

“No,” Jason answered. However, he was doubtful of his own answer. He remembered the fight he and Thalia had had the other day, the heartbreak on his sister's face. But running away wasn’t Thalia’s style.

Well, maybe. 

But he didn’t want to say that. He didn't want the police to  _ not _ look for her. She was still a minor, so they had to, but in a month she would legally be an adult and could leave as she liked. And so Jason ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “She would never.”

The officer nodded, writing something down on his clipboard and stepping away.

Jason felt off. The anxiety from earlier that night had settled, but it was still there. Running across his nerves like spiders. It was giving him flashbacks to his mom’s memorial service. 

No, not the service. 

The  _ planning _ of the service. 

When he’d needed to keep a level head despite the fact that he felt like vomiting and sleeping at the same time. He had been so tired then. He was tired now. He was torn between wanting to search the whole of Greenwood, the whole of New York, for his sister and wanting to go into his room and never come back out again.

His fingers reached down to his wrist where Percy had slid the familiar rubber band he always wore onto him. 

“Snap this,” Percy had told Jason when he’d found him on Thalia’s bedroom floor. His jeans were covered in mud, Jason had noticed. His eyes were wild. But his hands were soft and calm and gentle and his voice was steady and careful and kind. “Do you have Wifi?” He then brought him into the living room, directing his breathing like some kind of makeshift behavioral therapist, and proceeded to place a pair of headphones onto his ears. It had taken several seconds for Jason to realize it was the sound of the seaside coming from the headphones, waves crashing again and again onto some invisible shore.

Jason had stayed there until the police arrived and now he stood in the kitchen, snapping the rubber band on his wrist again.

And again.

Again.

Again.

_ Snap. _

_ Snap. _

_ Snap. _

“Hey.”

Jason looked up, his breath coming out shakily when he realized it was Percy. He stood closer than usual, his fingers coming to tug gently on the hem of Jason’s shirt. There was a strange smell to him, herbal, and then Jason realized it was because he was holding a mug of tea. He held it out to Jason, who took it carefully.

“I hate tea,” Jason said.

Percy replied, “I know.”

Jason took a sip.

Percy settled against the kitchen counter beside him, pulling himself up so he could sit on the edge of the sink. He smelled like earth and stale sweat. “I talked to Tri,” he said. “He’s going to go to Bryce’s house to see what he can find out.”

Jason looked up at him from his mug, startled. “He is?”

Percy nodded. “Apparently, there’s been a connection between the missing teens and Bryce’s gang. Nothing telling, but… Tri thinks it has to do with drugs.”

“Thalia wouldn’t--”

“That the kids have  _ been drugged _ or something,” Percy amended. “Apparently they show signs of being given that date-rape drug, but they haven’t been able to find any trace of it on them. No physical signs of injury.”

“Aliens,” Jason said, but without enthusiasm.

Percy went quiet.

And then there was a the pressure of a fist pushing gently into his arm -- Percy’s version of shoulder-touching. “They’ll find her. They found the others.”

“The others had no memory,” Jason reminded him.

Percy chewed at his lip, thinking. “Do you want,” he asked, “to go out to the woods tonight?”

Jason’s eyes darted to Percy’s. He was oddly comforted by the uneasiness he found there. For once, it seemed like Percy wanted him to say ‘no’. “Do you think,” Jason asked, “the sixth circle…?”

Percy visibly shuddered, but Jason wasn’t scared anymore.

His body felt charged.

With his mother’s death, he hadn’t been able to find any answers that made sense. Who, in Greenwood, would have caused a hit and run? Who, in Greenwood, would have hit his mother and left her on the road? Who, in Greenwood, would be able to smear his mother's body across the pavement and be able to continue life as normal?

_A cremation may be better_ , the nurse had said. _They won't be able to make her look... They won't be able to make her look as if she'd been alive_.

Here, now, Jason had the chance to find the answers he needed. Maybe not for his mother, but for his sister. And he was going to find them. 

“I do,” Jason said.

Percy gave a slow nod as he thought of this. “It should be another ten minutes before the police leave,” he said. "And then we should wait a little bit before heading out.”

“Do you still have a shovel?” Jason asked. He said it quietly. His veins were thrumming. For the first time in a year he felt…

Well.

He  _felt_. 

Percy’s eyes passed over his face as if he too noticed the difference. But if he did, he said nothing about it. Simply, he answered, “Yes.”

Jason nodded and looked back into his tea. Bits of leaf had settled at the bottom and Jason watched them as he took a sip. Once he’d swallowed, Jason whispered to the cabinets, “There’s something else.”

“What else?” Percy replied to the floor. His hands were clasped between his knees and he looked vaguely like a schoolboy at the Principal’s office. His skin was a delicate pale brown color where the rubber band had been.

“What do you know about ghosts?” Jason asked.

Percy gave him an unamused look, but Jason shook his head. 

“I mean,” he said, and then told Percy of the afterimage of the thing he’d thought he’d seen in Thalia’s room. “It wasn’t there,” he said. “But it was. I mean, I couldn’t see it, but when I turned on the light…”

“Well,” Percy said, musing, “I guess, in theory, a spirit could be considered an empty object. So when you looked in the dark and abruptly turned on the light, the photoreceptors of your eyes could have interpreted the image of the spirit as dark and therefore visible when before it wasn’t.”

“What?”

“You know how when you look at a white shape in the middle of a green background and then when the background becomes white, you somehow still see the shape as green?”

Jason said, “Yeah?”

“It’s like that.”

“But that’s an optical illusion,” replied Jason. “I’ve never heard of that happening with ghosts before.”

Percy admitted, “Neither have I.”

Together, they looked toward Thalia’s bedroom. A policewoman was looking through Thalia’s computer while another officer glanced around her floor for some kind of evidence. “Are you sure,” Percy asked, “that it was a ghost?”

Jason frowned. “What else could it be?”

Percy watched as the officers left Thalia’s room, turning off the light and leaving the door ajar. For a moment he stared into the darkness. 

Finally, he said, “I have no idea.”


	17. ring

It smelled like earth.

Thalia could feel the breeze on her cheek, but still it smelled like earth. For a brief, possibly irrational, moment she was terrified that she had been buried alive. They hadn't done it before with the others, but Bryce was always willing to try new things.

But only one side of her face was pressed into cool, loose soil. She opened her eyes to try to see, but she couldn't make anything out. There were no sounds save for a cricket chirping off in the distance.

It was too late in the year for crickets.

Yet she could hear them, clear as day. After listening for a moment longer, trying to hear over the chirping for anything -- a breath, a sniffle, a shift of a leg -- she rolled partially onto her back.

Her hands were still bound with rope, but they were in front of her now and Bryce had always been shit at binding. She rubbed her wrists together, both mindfully and mindlessly as she tried to take in what was around her.

It was dark, but there was just enough light somewhere that her eyes could see the nearest surface to her left: stone. She followed it up, up. As her eyes adjusted, she could see a slightly darker line above the stone. But she couldn't see beyond that.

Thalia craned her head up, wrists still rubbing. One of the ropes was beginning to loosen and soon she'd be able to tug it up over her hands with her teeth. But for now she rubbed them and searched, searched.

There was light towards her feet, faint and ghost-like. The light of evenings and misty mornings. She noticed clumps of moss and ivy hanging in the light.

A cave, Thalia thought.

She dug her heels into the earth and shimmied her hips down, down. Reached with her legs, dug in her heels, shimmied. Reached, dug, shimmied.

Dirt slid into the backs of her shoes. Rocks dug into her back. Still, she made her way forward, listening, rubbing her wrists.

She managed to slide to the opening of the cave. It was night. There were no stars, but the moon lurked behind a sea of clouds like a cataract-affected eye. She was still in the forest, but she didn't recognize this part.

The trees were thicker, the earth soft and loose and wet from rain. A sharp rock was digging into her back, but Thalia ignored it in favor of bringing the rope around her hands to her mouth, fighting the first loop with her teeth. It was still too tight. She released it, tugging at her wrists.

She watched the trees, searching for… something.

As she searched, she noticed something odd and white near her feet. Thalia tensed her stomach and pulled herself up. Dirt crumbled from her hair and down into her shirt. She focused on the small, white object.

It was a mushroom.

No, mushrooms.

Dozens of them.

Hundreds of them.

She followed them with her eyes until she lost focus of them in the dark. The spread around the cave in a circle.

No, she thought. In a _ring_.

Thalia tucked one of her legs beneath her and awkwardly brought herself to her feet. It still smelled like earth, but not because she had been laying in it. Even the warm breeze --  _ Warm? _ \-- smelled like something fiercely natural. Like tree root. Moss. Decay. Thalia choked on it.

And then one of the trees moved.

Thalia darted her eyes to the dark shape, but when her eyes latched onto it, holding it, studying it,  _ challenging  _ it, the tree stood still. Thalia didn't trust that it had been her imagination. She had seen Bryce lift a child from the ground and snap his spine against an oak. She saw her mother's bloody face staring at her in the kitchen.

Thalia knew what psychosis looked like. And what was real.

The tree moved again.

Thalia stumbled back.

But what was a tree hadn't really been a tree at all.

It was a person. Or rather, was supposed to be a person. But it's arms…

What was wrong with its  _ arms? _

Thalia stumbled back again, but with intention now rather than fear. Her hands were useless, but her feet could move. Move.  _ Move _ . She ran from the tree person  _ thing _ , stumbled, regained footing, stumbled, ran.

But she had forgotten the ring.

 


	18. the turn around

It felt different this time, going into the woods.

The air was thick with the smell of earth save only for the fierce, bitter scent of cold. It burned Jason's nose. Percy led the way again, but he walked slower through the trees than he had on previous nights. His flashlight danced across the underbrush as if it were a stranger to him. His eyes darted from tree to tree.

Jason understood his caution.

What they had seen, what they had heard before, had been real. But somehow Thalia disappearing had turned  _ real  _ into  _ reality.  _ The truth was no longer just out there. It was here. And it was lurking beneath their feet in the crunch of the tree roots, in the squelch of their sneakers.

An owl hooted somewhere in the trees.

Jason clenched his hand around the length of the shovel. His fingers were numb, but the weight of the blade angling toward the ground gave him a kind of confidence. The kind Jason imagined Percy had when the EMF reader glowed a fierce and angry red.

The night was starless again, muddy with clouds. Jason didn't know what time it was, but he knew it was incredibly late or incredibly early. The trees parted briefly, then crowded them with their huge, reaching bodies. Jason nearly tripped several times.

After what felt like eternity, there was the familiar sound of the creek bubbling, choking, gagging on their right. The ground began to tilt upward and Jason followed Percy up, up. He stumbled for a moment, then caught himself and they turned left. The ground went up again and Jason's breath sounded loud in his ears. Had the woods always been this quiet?

Finally, the earth evened out again and Percy came to a stop. His flashlight was dim now, the batteries dying, but Jason could make out the dip ahead of them that led to the clearing.

Percy met his eyes. There was something off about his face, the shadows of the trees grasping at it and pulling the angles of his jaw, of his cheeks into something unsettling. But then Jason blinked and they were simply shadows again. Percy's face was a face.

And he had been staring too long.

"Ready?" Jason asked, looking sharply to the dip in the ground.

"No," said Percy, quietly. "I have a bad feeling about this."

Jason said, "It's the anxiety."

"No," Percy replied. "I don't think it is."

Together they descended, feet heavy, limbs awkward, sliding down the slope and onto dead soil. Percy shined the flashlight across the ground, but the beam didn't reach very far and within a couple of moments the batteries died. Percy was undeterred and as they walked carefully into the clearing Jason could hear him replacing them. 

"Do you see the stones?" Jason asked.

Percy smacked the flashlight until light bloomed across the ground. "We need to go further," he said.

They walked ten feet, twenty feet, thirty. And then, there, Jason caught sight of one of the strange circles.

Nausea rose, sharp and fierce, from Jason's stomach to his throat. "Which one do we…?" He couldn't remember which ones were new, which ones were old. They all looked the same: six feet long, some three feet wide. There was no disparity between the odd carvings. Nothing unique about the small, white mushrooms. Each one was identical.

"This one, I guess," Percy said, stepping around the stones. "I don't think there's anything here."

"Or," Jason added, "there could be six bodies."

Percy said nothing. He held the flashlight to the circle.

They stood for a moment, their breath the only sound save for the faint breeze. Then, Jason asked, "I'm the only one digging?"

"There's only one shovel," Percy pointed out. He added, "I don't think we should dig."

"We came all the way  _ out here  _ to dig," said Jason. He adjusted the shovel in his hands so the handle and shaft fit comfortably in his palms. "And if Thalia's under there…"

"I know," Percy said. "But--"

"The soil sample came back normal, right?" Jason challenged.

Percy scowled. "Yes, but--"

Jason lifted the shovel and brought it down, sharply, into the earth.

Percy's breath caught.

Nothing happened.

Jason gave a small, victorious exhale through his nose. He lifted his foot and brought it down on the blade of the shovel. The dirt came up easily and Jason tossed the mass of soil over his shoulder. He did this several more times until he began to make a dent in the earth. 

Jason moved forward to get a better grip on the shovel.

His foot moved, just so.

Just  _ so _ .

And nudged one of the stones.

And then suddenly.

There were trees.

Dozens of trees.

Reaching their grotesque arms up into the night sky.

The stones were gone.

The shovel -- gone.

Percy -- gone.

The clearing, all of it, gone.

Jason turned wildly. Startled, terrified. Where had the trees come from? 

Jason gaped for a moment, then gave a rattling breath and shouted.

He waited a moment, two, three. " _ Percy! _ " He could hear his own blood in his ears, the rising sound of his heartbeat. It unnerved him. The trees unnerved him.

He stepped around in a frantic gesture to find the stones again as if they had been some kind of portal, but he found nothing. Just silence. And then, very clearly, an owl. 

Jason looked toward the trees, trying to make his eyes adjust to the darkness. Yet the longer he stared, the darker the spaces between the trees seemed to get.

Was this, he thought, what happened to Thalia?

He thought of the shadowed figure in his sister's room.

The silence rang.

Jason walked a couple of steps to block out the sound of his own heartbeat with the crunching of leaves. There was ringing, ringing, his blood, his heart, his breathing. He focused too heavily on his breathing. He couldn't quite inhale. 

Ringing, blood, heart, breath.

Leaves. 

Ringing, blood, name, heart, b--

Jason stopped and turned his head.

He'd heard his name.

Faint.

But there.

And then again, still faint, but very much a name.

In Percy's voice.

"Percy!" Jason roared back. He began to move, then stopped, listened. He heard his name again, louder this time, and then began walking in that direction. If it weren't for the trees, he would have run, but he knew he would trip over the roots. And besides.

He had a sinking feeling that if he ran, something would chase him.

A creek made a garbled sound at Jason's left and he startled at its familiar noise. He hadn't gone to another world at all, then. This was still Greenwood, still the woods. And the thing using Percy's voice was still--

"Fucking shit," Percy snapped as Jason stumbled over the hill. Percy had managed to scramble back up out of the clearing, his clothes heavily dirtied. He sounded short of breath and Jason noticed his hands were shaking. "Fucking shit," he said again.

"What happened?" Jason asked.

"Me!" Percy exclaimed. "You're asking me!"

Jason spread his arms.

"You disappeared you piece of--  _ garbage _ , sweet merciful-- Fuck." Percy leaned forward and for a second Jason swore he was going to punch him. But then Percy was sinking down, down to the ground and folding his legs like a child in kindergarten.

He held his head in his hands.

Jason stood away, watching. He waited until Percy ran his fingers down his arms, through his hair, over his face. Then he said, "It took me to another part of the woods."

It was still too soon to speak. Percy let out a whooshing, snorting sound of disbelief and rage.

Jason waited a little longer.

Finally, Percy let out a shuddering breath. "This was a mistake," he said.

"Where's the shovel?" Jason asked.

"You're not digging anymore," Percy said. Jason didn't comment that he sounded like his brother.

"I barely dug at all," Jason said.

Percy spread his arms.

Jason sighed and sat down across from him. The silence still unnerved him, but with Percy it was bearable. The woods didn't seem as threatening. Just… woods. "She could be in there," he said quietly. 

Percy shook his head.

"Thalia could be--" Jason began again, but Percy stopped him. His eyes were fierce even in the dark.

"You broke the ring," he said.

"The what?" Jason asked.

Percy sighed and looked up at the sky. The moon loomed above them, a ghastly glow in the smoke of the clouds. "I told you," he said, "that I didn't think we should dig." He rubbed at his eyes, then roughly at his nose. "And it was because there was something familiar, I guess, about the mushrooms. The stones were a giveaway. I should've guessed before."

Jason tried to think back to the alien documentaries they'd watched together on Netflix. But there was nothing he could remember about mushrooms. "Guessed what?" he asked.

"The circle of mushrooms," Percy said. "It's called a ring."

"Okay?"

Percy looked at him. "A  _ fairy  _ ring."


	19. im drinking something called molly's hatchet

"A fairy ring," Jason said. 

Percy's face was serious, his eyes steady, but Jason had the distinct feeling that he was laughing at him.

He closed his eyes. Opened them. Adrenaline was still coursing through his veins and his skin itched with anxiety.  _ Is there any chance she may have run away?  _ "You're saying," Jason said, slowly, "that Tinkerbell. Is making circles in the clearing. That a tiny-- that a--" He lifted his fingers, holding them apart two inches. "That a-- fairy. A fairy. That a  _ fairy  _ is killing people. Not aliens, but a-- a-- a--"

Percy reached forward and gently touched his hand. He pulled it back down to Jason's lap and for a moment Jason was too distracted by the warmth of his calloused fingers to be offended.

"I said it was a fairy ring," Percy said. "Not that anyone was killing people."

"So, what," Jason began, "you think they're unrelated now? The--  _ fairy  _ ring and the--" He waved his other hand in the air.

"Triton said that he thinks Bryce is involved with the disappearances," said Percy. "Remember? I mean, your sister did hang out with him, right?"

Jason's blood chilled. Aliens, he thought, had been a far better thing to think about than Bryce. Aliens just abducted people. Experimented. Sent people back to Earth.

Bryce Lawrence was something far worse and although Jason had warned Thalia, he hadn't really thought about what would happen. Not realistically.

"You think he…" Jason began.

Percy shrugged, but not rudely.

It was too quiet in the woods.

"I want to go see Bryce," Jason said.

Percy didn't frown, but his lips tilted just a bit. "Not tonight."

"I thought you said that patronizing wasn't--"

"My brother's questioning him," said Percy and Jason quieted. "Tomorrow we can… Tomorrow."

Jason ran a hand over his face. His eyes were stinging. "Tomorrow," he agreed. Then, "Can you stay the night?"

Percy shifted, although Jason wasn't sure if it was because of the question or because of the cold. They'd been sitting on the ground for too long. Jason couldn't feel his thighs. "In case Thalia…?"

"I don't feel safe staying there alone," Jason admitted. "The thing I saw. Or the thing I thought I saw, I don't--"

"Yeah," Percy said. "Okay."

They were quiet again. Jason rubbed at his eyes. How late was it? "Should we go back and fix the ring?" he asked instead. He had too many questions about what happened, but his head was cloudy with the need for sleep.

"I already did," Percy said.

Jason frowned and looked at him. "What?"

"After you disappeared, I fixed it. I thought it would bring you back."

"You fixed it."

"Yes."

Jason scooted forward in the dirt. His jacket pulled up in the back and cold air dragged along his skin. Percy's knees touched his. "You touched the ring."

"Not the mushroom," Percy corrected. "You squished it with your shoe. I just moved the stone."

"But you didn't disappear? You didn't end up in the woods?"

"No," Percy said, frowning.

They stared at each other.

Percy's eyes darted down, then up.

Jason asked, "How?"

"Maybe," Percy said, "it only works once."

It was plausible.

Probable.

Possible.

"Strange," Jason said to the sky.

"Strange," Percy said the earth.

They stood and waited for their legs to regain blood flow before moving back through the trees. As they stumbled over roots and twigs, leaves scattering and crunching under their feet, Percy said, "What do you know about fairies?"

Jason gave him a look.

Percy shook his head. "Not Tinkerbell. I mean fairies. Celtic fairies. The sidhe." He said the last word like "she."

Jason's face smoothed again as he thought. "I don't know," he finally said. "They're pranksters, right?"

"Right," Percy said. "But they can also be dangerous when they're mad."

Jason thought of tiny winged people throwing a tantrum. It made him smile.

"It's why the Irish won't disturb the fairy mounds," Percy said. "There's been cases of some people messing with them and then having their homes become war zones. Doors slamming. Random screams. Breaking windows."

"Sounds like a poltergeist," said Jason.

Percy said, "Exactly."

That made Jason frown. "What?"

"Tiny winged people," said Percy, "are a modern creation of what fairies look like. But the word 'sidhe' for the fairies also means 'spirit.'"

Jason stopped walking. "You mean fairies and ghosts could be the same thing?"

"I mean," Percy said, and also stopped walking, "what if there's some merit to what you saw in Thalia's room?"

Jason thought of that. And then quietly, he said, "I think I prefer Tinkerbell."

The woods began to wake as they made their way to the car. Birds chirped and the sky began to lighten from a ghastly black to a smoky blue. At the sight of the station wagon, Jason heard Jupiter's cheerful barking. Jason said, "Do you think we should investigate the house?"

"What?" Percy asked. "Like do an EVP session?"

"Like an EVP session," Jason agreed. He thought of the… thing. The strangely long arms. "I want to know if it's really there."

Percy nodded thoughtfully. He smiled when they reached the station wagon. Jupiter nosed at his hand from the window. "And then tomorrow--" he began.

"Tonight," Jason amended.

Percy gave him a look, but agreed. "Tonight," he said, "we talk to Bryce."


	20. The EVP

The room was quiet save for the sound of the leaves rustling against the window. The carpet of Thalia's room prickled against Jason's legs where his jeans had bunched up around his socks. Percy sat across from him, his knees nearly touching Jason's, face illuminated in the darkness by the glow of the EMF reader.

The two of them had slept out in the living room, but only for a couple of hours. Jason had been exhausted. But the uncertainty of Thalia's disappearance, the impossibility of the broken fairy ring, and the inability to distinguish the realness of what he had seen in his sister's room had kept Jason on the very edge of consciousness every time he tried to close his eyes.

To his credit, Percy's presence had made the ranch feel less empty. Despite the differences that had torn apart the Jackson brothers, Percy and Triton both had a habit of taking up an entire room simply by being in it. The simple act of shucking off his mud-clad boots at the door, setting the shovel in an inconspicuous corner, and then depositing himself onto the couch had made Percy far more present than whatever entity may have been possessing Jason's house.

It was that feeling that comforted Jason now as Percy's steady voice asked into the darkness, “What is your name?”

There was the faint jingling sound of Jupiter's collar in the kitchen. The leaves blew against the window again. Jason's eyes swallowed as much light as they could grab, trying to watch for any movement, any apparitions. Although he had done paranormal investigations with Percy before, those had been in odd places decorated in legend, places of escape and possible magic. In his own home, the magic of it had been stripped to something ugly that wore Jason's fear as a coat.

“Why are you here?” Jason asked the walls. He thought he saw Percy look at him, but when Jason looked back he saw Percy was merely scratching his neck.

Silence, once again, drew out long and aching. Jason could hear Percy's breath and then his own. This, too, was familiar territory although he had forgotten the intense dullness of it.

Percy asked, “Are you the one who took Thalia?”

Jason flinched.

They listened.

There was the distinct _click-click-click_ of the heater turning on. Jason glanced at Percy. Percy looked back, unperturbed. They continued the session for nearly an hour, asking questions both personal and objective before Jason's rattling sigh indicated he had had enough.

The ranch was rendered welcoming again as Jason turned on lights in the kitchen and living room. Percy sat on the counter, noise-canceling headphones on as he listened to the audio they had recorded, while Jason filled a pot with water to make cheese ravioli. Every so often, Jason would glance up at Percy's face for a sign of anything. Any indication of an answer, any indication of a sound that didn't belong to either of them.

But Percy's face remained stoic and not-quite-there. His eyes had a faraway look in them. He was staring at the lower cabinets without really looking at them.

Jason gripped a handful of frozen ravioli from a bag and dumped them into the water. His fingers tapped along the side of the stove. Still, Percy's face was expressionless.

“Well?” Jason exploded.

He hadn't really said it so loud, but the quiet of the kitchen, of the house, of Percy's face, had made it so. Percy hadn't heard him, but something in the way Jason had moved his hands had gotten his attention.

Jason lifted his eyebrows.

Percy shook his head.

The water began to boil. Jason pulled one of the wooden spoons from the drawer to stir the pasta with.

Triton had yet to call them about Bryce's questioning and Jason badly wanted to call the police station himself. Instead, he stirred the pasta, watched for Percy's face, and waited.

**

There was nothing on the recording.

“It doesn't mean what you saw wasn't real,” Percy assured him. “Plenty of hauntings are legit, but don't have a positive EVP session.” But Jason still felt sick to his stomach about it. He pushed his ravioli around on his plate while Percy inhaled his beside him on the couch. When Jupiter began to nose at the table, he didn't shush him away.

“What would fairies be doing in Greenwood?” Jason asked. He hissed as Jupiter's teeth missed the pasta and grabbed his thumb instead. “I mean, if we found footprints of Bigfoot or something it would make more sense. Aren't fairies an Irish thing?”

“Greenwood's always had a large Irish population,” Percy said, cutting one of the ravioli in half. “But I don't think that's what brought the sidhe. They may have always been here for all we know. They've been reported in the South too, but reports have always sounded more like the will-o'-the-wisps than actual fae.”

“But why would they be here _now_? Haven't you been exploring the woods for years?”

“Not years,” Percy corrected. “Only since...” He trailed off, eyebrows pinching in thought.

“Only since your mom?” Jason finished for him.

Percy said, “No.” Then, “I mean, yes. But-- What did you say that thing looked like in Thalia's room?”

Jason set his plate on the floor, making a face at the lapping sounds of Jupiter's tongue as he cleaned it. “It looked like a man, I guess. But it had arms that were too long. They were bent kind of funny.”

“I know you said it was an afterimage but, by any chance, did you happen to see anything else about it?” Percy's voice sounded oddly guarded.

Jason frowned. “Like what?”

“Anything,” Percy said. “Anything at all.”

Jason tried to think back, but his memory was a fog of panic. “I don't remember,” he said finally. “There wasn't really any identifiable features. It was just a dark outline.”

Percy went uncharacteristically still. “A dark outline,” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Jason said, trying to shrug it all. “It was just a dark figure. I couldn't see anything discernible.”

He looked at Percy's face. It was stony and set, but his eyes were fiercely bright with something Jason couldn't quite name.

But it looked like triumph.

 


	21. aliens

"I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before," Percy said as he dug through Jason's desk. 

He moved with a renewed vigor Jason hadn't seen since the discovery of the stone circles in the woods. His hands darted from drawer to drawer, rudely pushing aside papers and homework from Jason's first year at college. Finally, he re-emerged, his fist clutching a black marker in one hand and a blank piece of notebook paper in the other.

"You could have just asked for something to write on," Jason said wryly, but he knew this was a meaningless thing to say. 

The majority of Percy's actions were conducted as a means to a  _ process  _ rather than a means to an  _ end _ . His entire life was a hero's journey simply because he made it so. It was one of the things Jason envied about his friend. Some days, he too wished that he could pull Adventure by the collar whether it was waiting for him or not. Although,  _ adventure  _ seemed to mean something different for both boys.

When Percy called Jason asking him if he wanted to go on an adventure, he meant to ask if Jason wanted to discover the truth about the world.

When Jason agreed to an adventure, he meant to answer that he wanted to run from the world that he knew. And why wouldn't he? If the past night's events had told Jason anything about Greenwood, anything about Reality, it was that it was filled with dark and hideous things that stole sisters away in the night and left mothers strewn across public roads.

Percy was drawing something on the paper.

Jason craned his neck to see. For a moment, in the dim light of his room, Jason thought Percy was drawing a blob. The shape of it made no sense. Dark lines were squiggled from edge to edge. But then, as Percy began to color them in, the sharp chemical scent of the Sharpie reaching Jason's nose, Jason realized what was on the paper.

Percy didn't have to ask the question.

"That's what I saw," Jason said. "That's what I saw in Thalia's room."

The drawing was crude, but it had the details it needed. Two human-like figures with short torsos and elongated arms. Their necks craned upwards to balance heads that contained no eyes, no noses, no mouths. Only darkness.

"That's what I saw," Percy said, his voice somehow both remote and fiercely present, "the night my mom disappeared."

Goosebumps rose on Jason's skin. "Why didn't you say something before?" he asked. There was the nearly inaudible sound of the house settling toward the back wall of Jason's room and for a moment he was distracted by it, his eyes warily glancing toward the window. The ranch's ancient floorboards and foundation often gasped and sighed in the night.

"You said it was an after-image," Percy said. He tapped the paper.

Jason looked back down at the desk. He understood what he meant. He hadn't been able to really determine what he'd seen, let alone determine if he'd really seen  _ anything _ , and so his description had been marginal. Percy's drawing, though, had the details of someone had not only seen one of these things up close, but of someone who continued to see these things in their mind's eye every day afterward.

"They kind of look like aliens," muttered Jason. And then Jason said again, but slowly, " _ Aliens _ ."

In a tone mirroring Jason's exasperation a week before, Percy groaned, "If you say my mom was abducted, I'm gonna--"

Percy stopped talking.

He stared down at the paper.

Jason began, excited, "What if--" 

There was the nearly inaudible sound of the house definitely  _ not _ settling toward the back wall of Jason's room and for a moment both boys were distracted by it, their eyes anxiously snapping toward the window.

They waited.

Jason couldn't hear over his own heartbeat.

Then there was the sound again:  _ crICK-shhh. _

Ever so slowly, Jason and Percy's eyes followed their ears. And ever so slowly, something warm and wet dribbled down the length of Jason's left pantleg.

The sound had come from Thalia's bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to make this chapter longer, but I was running out of time before my bus came and I wanted to be sure to post this today.  
> I'm starting a tentative schedule!! The next chapter should be up either before or by Sunday, September 17!


	22. the look

Thalia's bedroom door was closed.

Jason eyed it as he carefully stepped around the floorboards, his laptop poised in his hands as a makeshift weapon. Percy followed him, his own hands tightly gripping the end of a small, white statue of a dog with wings. Before Percy had plucked it from Jason's bookshelf, the statue had sat over the ashes of Graces' cocker spaniel, Lupa.

Another sound came from the bedroom. This time it was distinct. A chair being dragged on wood. Jason's terror thrummed loud in his veins. Still, his hands weren't shaking as much as Percy's were. Together they carefully made their way to either side of the door, a ragged-breathed crime-fighting duo armed with knick-knacks and their own shriveling courage.

At some point, Jason would possibly look back on this memory with humor. A team of cryptid hunters undone by an unknown sound in an empty room. But because this was the present and Jason couldn't see the humor in any of it. Because this was not moving through the woods looking for Bigfoot and rocks or sitting in the hay bails of Father McClung's decaying farm with a recorder. This was every biological part of Jason's very fragile body telling him he was going to die.

Percy found Jason's eyes and for a brief moment Jason remembered the voices of the people they had seen in the woods. _I see you._ His chest hurt with the strength of his beating heart.

Percy's left hand reached out. He took the door handle in his sweat-slick palm.

Jason's breathing stopped.

And then they threw open the door and lunged.

The room was as dark as they had left it, but even in the shadows of the bedroom walls, even in the echoes of Percy's ferocious cries, even with hair wild and knotted with leaves, Jason recognized the form of his own sister.

As the boys exploded into the room, Thalia Grace had let out something between a foul curse and a horrible scream. Her window was open, screenless and gaping from where she had crept in. Her bed sheets were rumpled and muddied from where she had stepped over them. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were shredded and torn although it was difficult to say if they had been that way prior to her disappearance. Her face was dirtied and covered in scratches from tree branches and twigs.

But she was alive.

Very much alive.  
  
"What," Thalia shouted, "the _hell_?"

**

Greenwood had no hospital and so they had to make the nearly thirty minute drive out to Beyland Medical Center for Thalia to be examined by a doctor. Beyland was barely a city itself, but it was still large enough to swallow Greenwood twice and old enough to have a history.  
     
The Medical Center was a small building, white and flat. It smelled like latex gloves and the bland, sweet smell of the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Jason sat in the waiting area, his legs spread wide in a fresh pair of jeans and his hands folded in his lap. The chair beneath him was cushioned, but uncomfortably so and the orange material was peeling and ancient. CNN rambled on a television high above him and he couldn't quite make out the words. There were magazines scattered on a coffee table, each one at least six or seven months old.  
  
Jason would have taken one to flip through – it had been nearly forty minutes since they'd checked in and his nervousness wasn't doing anyone any favors -- but he was preoccupied by the conversation that was happening in the hallway some twenty-five feet away. Percy and his brother were having an animated talk although it seemed to be mostly one sided. It hadn't taken long for the police to arrive at the Medical Center to question Thalia.  
  
The questioning had been surprisingly brief and surprisingly unhelpful. Thalia had no memory of anything that had transpired between the day she went missing and the night she returned. According to her, she had been walking down the road between Hawthorne and Blossom after school when she blacked out. She woke up, she said, in the woods. Three days later. No memory. No nothing.

The police had requested a drug test.

Thalia had obliged.

And now Jason waited while the doctors performed a series of medical tests to ensure Thalia's total health. He tried not to feel the sting of the price of each and every one those tests, but the payment for the house was due that week and he had only put in so many hours at work.

 _It'll be fine_ , Jason thought. _It's for her. She's okay._

The conversation between Percy and Triton was becoming a little more heated. Percy did a complicated gesture with his hands and Jason tried not to make it obvious that he was watching him. He couldn't quite see Percy's face, but he could see Triton's, stoic and judging. Percy was just loud enough that Jason could make out the words " _lying son of a_ " before his friend put his face in his hands. He dragged his fingers down his face and over his handsome neck before settling them behind his hairline and cupping the skin there.  
  
Triton said something in a low voice and at this Percy nodded. Then he turned on his heel and headed toward Jason. His face was a mask of disappointment, so unshakably so that if Jason hadn't been paying attention he may have missed it.  
  
"It" being this: Just as Percy had turned away from his brother, Triton's face morphed into something Jason had only seen once before in the eyes of his own sister when their mom had crudely called her a dyke over a plate of chicken breast.

The look of pure, unsullied, unadulterated hatred.

And then the look slipped off into Triton's dark, featureless face as fast as it had slipped on and the older Jackson brother disappeared back down the hall to join the rest of the officers.

"It wasn't Bryce," Percy said miserably.

Jason jumped, having been too focused on Triton to have remembered the other boy's approach. "What?"

Percy slumped into a hospital chair beside him, his curls a frizzed mess of frayed knots. They looked soft. "Another dead end," he said, plucking at his jacket sleeve. And then, "Maybe we could go back to the stones."

Fear jumped down Jason's spine at the thought of the woods, but he stamped it down. "What exactly did Triton say?" he asked.

Percy waved a hand in the air.

"Percy," Jason said again, "what did Triton say?"

Percy's eyes found his, obviously bemused by the intensity of Jason's voice. "He said that Bryce had a solid alibi just like he did with the other disappearances. He'd been with his mom taking care of his grandma in Pennsylvania or something. She's got dementia. Bryce's mom confirmed it and everything. They have paperwork proving their visitation at the assisted living home."

"Did he show it to you?" Jason asked.

Percy frowned. "The assisted living home?"

"The evidence. Did Triton show you the evidence?"

"In the hour since we've been here?"

There was a shuffling sound as the police began to come back down the hallway as a unit. Jason glanced at them and then back at Percy. "I'm getting pizza later," he said, "with onions. Do you want to come over?" This was said at the same time that Triton entered the waiting room, checking his watch and then the clock on the wall as if the time would be different, as if he had something better to do in the quiet of the night.  
  
Percy's eyebrows pressed together. The already scabbed skin of his lower lip slid up between his teeth. "Sure," he said, but slowly, and he held Jason's eyes.

Jason was allergic to onions.

The doctor came out of the room, her hair tied back in a bun of intricately tied braids. Thalia exited the room behind her. She was wearing one of Jason's sweatshirts and for a moment Jason's heart panged with the memory of several Christmases ago when she had been small enough to swim in his t-shirts. Thalia saw him staring. She flipped him off.

"Well," the doctor said, turning to the side to address them all. "Everything seems to be fine. We'll get the results back from the drug test in about 10 days or so. Otherwise, you're all free to go."  
  
Jason and Percy stood, gravitating toward Thalia like two fraternal planets. The police turned to leave, but Triton stayed and as Jason and the others walked toward the exit, Jason heard him say, "Doctor, can I have a word please?"

"What's up?" Percy asked in a low voice once they slid into the cold interior of the station wagon. But Jason shook his head. He glanced up in the rearview mirror at his sister's tired face and then back toward the hospital.

Finally, after a moment, Jason asked, "Do you trust your brother?"

It was an odd question cast into a night of odd questions and Percy frowned. "I guess," he said.

"Since when?" Jason replied.

This was, perhaps, an even stranger question and it took several long, drawn-out seconds for Percy to answer. "Since Thalia…"

"What about before then? Did you before then?"

Jason didn't have to look at Percy's face to know he was thinking about the night in the woods, of the cop that had slammed the end of the flashlight down hard across the elegant slope of Percy's nose. "No," Percy said, flat and factual.

Jason nodded once.

He cast his eyes back up at the rearview mirror again, but this time not at Thalia. Triton had emerged from the double doors of the medical center, as solid and foreboding as the eye of a storm. And it was in that moment, the moment Jason watched the tired and frigid shoulders of Captain Jackson as he walked back to his cruiser, the moment Jason compared that man to the man he'd seen with the vile loathing in the deep set blue of his eyes directed at his younger brother, that the suspicion Jason felt deep in his gut twisted and formed into a true thought.

No, not a thought. A _realization_.

The realization that it wasn't that Bryce Lawrence had the perfect alibi.

But that Triton had never questioned Bryce Lawrence at all.

Jason pulled the car into reverse.

In the mirror, his eyes were alight with something he couldn't quite name. But it looked like triumph.


	23. Chapter 23

Jupiter barked loudly when they returned home. The house was dark, but for once it didn't feel vacant. Jason got out more frozen raviolis to cook, Thalia pulled out a couple of beers despite the disapproving look of her brother, and Percy set the table as if they were some kind of odd, three-person family made up of a teenager, a homeless boy, and a college dropout.

Jason couldn't remember the last time they'd eaten together at the kitchen table.

The night was alive with promise.

Thalia ate with vigor.

Jason ate with leisure.

Percy ate without knowing when his next hot meal would be.

Still, it was nice. The kitchen was warm with the smells of cooking and the lights were bright and warm and welcoming. Jupiter curled up under the kitchen table. Thalia laughed at a joke Percy made. Everything felt as it should be again.

Jason would go to work the next day and come home to his sister in her room listening to music. They would talk for a few minutes. Percy would call Jason with a new discovery he'd made in the woods or the McClung Farmhouse or the cornfields. Jason would listen as he wrote on his computer. And then their mom would--

Jason closed his eyes.

He opened them.

Thalia was watching him, her fork poised over a pool of spaghetti sauce. Jason offered her a tiny smile. He was gratified when she returned one back.

It would be okay.

“I should get going,” Percy said. His voice was quiet, as if didn't want to disturb the two of them.

“Sure,” said Jason, pulling back his chair. Then, “Thalia do you want to come with us?”

Thalia shook her head, which was just as well. Jason had sworn he'd seen Percy's shoulders tense at the question. It threw him off a little. “I just want to be alone for a little bit.”

Jason nodded. “Keep Jupiter with you,” he suggested.

“I'll be fine,” argued Thalia. But she was smiling. It felt good to see her smile.

Percy was quiet for most of the ride back to his house. The shovel they had used on the fairy ring sat in the back seat, dirt trickling on the floor of the car. The rest of the equipment was tucked away safely in Percy's hiking bag, which sat nestled between his thighs.

“You okay?” Jason asked as they got close to the open field where Percy's camper sat.

It wasn't like Percy to be quiet. He wondered if he was thinking about what Jason had said about Triton. If he was formulating a plan about Bryce. The latter was probably more likely. They wouldn't be able to just _go_ talk to Bryce, to question him.

Bryce Lawrence lived in a large house on the west side of Greenwood near the border between the town and Oliver's Point. The land around it was as dry as the grass before a brush fire and what wasn't covered in acres of gravel was covered in acres of corn.

Jason had only been out there once before, a year ago to be exact, for Bryce's annual Halloween party. Thalia had called him because she'd gotten drunk without meaning to – the punch was stronger than she'd thought – and Jason had had to lumber through two security guards of all people and a haunted cornfield maze just to get to the house.

Thalia had apologized and Jason had yelled and then a few months later their mom had been murdered. It felt like a decade ago, but also like no time at all. Bryce would be gearing up for their next big event. Halloween was only a week away.

“Fine,” Percy said, which meant that he wasn't. “Just tired,” he added, which meant he definitely wasn't. Percy was always tired, rejuvenated in the moonlight only by the free coffee he received by working at Riley's Roasters and the sheer excitement of near-discovery. To say that he was tired was to say he was breathing.

Jason pulled off into the little driveway that pulled up along Percy's camper. The blistering cold air whipped through the tall grass, eliciting a high-pitched whistle or possibly a scream. The camper was dark and cold and silver. When Jason said, “Here we are,” it felt a lot like pulling up to an old woodshed and declaring, “Home sweet home.”

Percy didn't move to get out. His face was pinched and scowling as he thought. Jason took in the soft, brown color of his face highlighted by the nearly full moon coming through the windshield. His curls had begun to grow longer, hugging at the tips of his ears. Jason thought about reaching over and touching one.

And then Percy stopped frowning and his lips were soft again under the delicate flare of his nose. Jason could smell his deodorant, the faint touch of cologne.

 _I just want to try,_ Jason thought. _Just this once._

Percy had turned to look at him, the intensity of his eyes making Jason's nerves rattle. When Percy looked at him, Jason felt like he did when he'd seen the dark figure in his room. Like when he'd heard his first EVP in his grandma's basement. Like the moment right before they'd swung open Thalia's bedroom door.

Horribly and inexplicably terrified. But also intensely excited.  
Hundreds of fantasies of how this would happen and it was happening at night in an open field like they were a couple of lascivious teenagers.

Jason leaned, his breath catching in his throat.

And then Percy said, “Did you notice that Thalia was eating with her right hand?”

Jason stopped and quickly ran his hand through his hair as if he hadn't just been trying to-- As if he--

“Wait, what?” asked Jason.

“She's left-handed,” Percy said, “but she was eating with her right hand.”

There was a moment of silence. It was the type of silence that could only be created when one party has been thinking of kissing the other and the other party has been thinking of conspiracy theories. It was a very heavy silence.

Jason broke it with an irritated, “So?”

“So,” Percy repeated. “Remember when we first found the stones and I had suggested that the kids that came back hadn't really come back?”

The question hung in the air.

Jason said, with a surprising amount of venom, “Get out of the car.”

Percy's eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“Don't ' _what?'_ me!” Jason spat. “It wasn't funny the first time you said it and it's definitely not funny now. Just because you're mad that your brother's been a phony this entire time–”

“That has nothing to do with–”

“What then? You're mad that my sister came back but your mom didn't? You can't just be happy for five minutes? You have to shove your paranoia down my throat?”

“It was an observation!” Percy shouted back. “She's left-handed! She was eating with her right hand! She picked things up with her right hand! She smiled at you! When was the last time you saw Thalia smile?”

“Jesus _Christ_ , Percy! Lots of left-handed people do things with their right hand! It doesn't make them aliens in disguise. It's like you get _off_ on this shit. Triton was _right_.” Percy's face was twisting in a way Jason didn't like, but he was too angry, too desperate for something to be good for once, that he wouldn't hear Percy, that he couldn't hear Percy, that he couldn't make himself stop. “You _are_ delusional.”

There was a moment of silence. It was the type of silence that usually followed the ending of a friendship. Jason heard it. He tried to backtrack, to form an apology, but he was still too upset to be truly sorry and Percy's furiously wet eyes had immobilized him.

“Fine,” Percy whispered. And oh. Oh no.

“Percy,” Jason said, his own face shifting now to accommodate the raw ache in his chest as Percy threw open the door and pulled himself out into the cold of the night. “Percy, wait, I didn't mean–” But it was futile. Not because Percy wouldn't hear him, but because it wasn't true. Jason _had_ meant it. It was voicing it that was the mistake.

“You can talk to Bryce yourself,” Percy said. His tears were gone, replaced with acid as he slammed the car door. “Maybe _he_ can talk you down from a panic attack the next time you piss yourself over something that isn't even _there_.” It was a low blow, but Jason had brought mental health into the fight to start with. It was only fair to taste some of the poison.

And then Percy was gone, trudging through the high grass with his bag pack swinging behind him, smacking his legs. Jason watched him, his fingers tightening on the steering wheel. He wanted to rip the car into reverse, to leave a donut in the wake of the mud and the dirt. But instead, he waited.

Percy unlocked the front door with one of the keys around his neck. Then he launched his bag somewhere inside. And without looking at Jason, he threw the door closed.

Jason carefully backed the car up until he felt the station wagon rock back onto the gravel road. He flashed his headlights, their usual signal for 'bye' and then he waited for Percy to flash one of his flashlights or his twinkle lights or his phone out through the window.

There was nothing.

 _You_ are _delusional._

Jason closed his eyes.

He opened them.

And then turned the wheel and headed back home.

 


	24. marty's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FAIR WARNING. This chapter gets a little weird, so I'm putting a warning for dissociation and unreality if that's a word.

(See chapter note above)  
  
The next few days were unbearably quiet.

Thalia returned to school but didn't stay out late at night with her friends anymore. Each time Jason returned home, he saw her room partially closed with light pouring out through the cracks. She was always speaking to someone. When Jason listened long enough he was relieved to realize it was Annabeth on the phone. It was like Thalia was 14 again.

School. Home. Annabeth. In that order.

Jason didn't mind it. It made his anxiety bearable again. He could go to work knowing his sister was making a future for herself and he could come home without worrying about her wrecking her life. And yet – there always seemed to be a yet – Jason couldn't help but feel that he was _wasting_ something.  


Despite his love for his mother, Jason had always been terrified of becoming her.

Beryl Grace had always told her son to follow his dreams. She didn't tell him this with the usual inspiring love of mothers in animated movies and television shows where the main character went off to become something great. Her eyes were always too disturbing to be inspiring. Her hand on his wrist was always too tight to be loving. And her breath always smelled a little too tangy to be anything else.

Jason loved his mother the way a boy loved an injured dog. Although, if Jason were Thalia, injured would perhaps be the wrong word. If Jason were Thalia, the word would have been _rabid_.

Beryl Grace had been born in a small, one-story home the way most girls were born in Greenwood. And like most girls born in Greenwood, she had dreamed big dreams of becoming an actress, of becoming a _star_. And like most girls born in Greenwood, these dreams remained dreams. They became swallowed in gravel driveways and in 24-hour diner milkshakes, in 9-to-5 jobs and cocktail hours, in movie nights and hollow promises made by boys.

“Follow your dreams,” Beryl had told her son. And she told him this the way a mother told their child they loved them before releasing them over a chasm. The chasm, Jason had realized years ago, was Greenwood.

“What are you doing?”

Jason blinked. He had been standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open, staring into the light. He was still wearing his work uniform, name-tag perched over his chest. He couldn't seem to remember the last time he hadn't been wearing it.

Thalia was looking at him oddly, cell phone in one hand and a spoon of peanut butter in the other. Her hair was getting longer but was still cropped short and shaggy. The way her black locks hung just so over her ears reminded him briefly of Percy. “Electric bill,” Thalia said, nodding toward the fridge. It was a phrase Jason had used many times before and it made him laugh tiredly.

He shut the refrigerator door.

Thalia disappeared back into her room, a shadow more than a person.

Jason pressed his forehead to the closed freezer door. He should make dinner, but he had grown tired of spaghetti, of ravioli, of ramen. He pulled his phone from his back pocket. No texts. No calls. He turned slowly so that his back was to the fridge. His thumb flicked over the phone screen to Percy's name. The last text he'd received from him had been a meme of some surrealist-style hamburger with a series of words in various fonts.

It reminded Jason of when Percy had first caught his attention. He'd been wildly discussing dadaism with another student, someone named Grover, and the wildness in his eyes, in his hands, had pulled at something low in Jason's gut. Not attraction, although Percy was unmistakably attractive.

It was that horrible _wanting_ Jason often felt when he looked at graduate school programs for journalism. When he saw other boys driving expensive cars. When he read biographies of directors who got discovered and dragged up through Hollywood.

Seeing Percy speaking to Grover, Jason at once wanted to be Percy: passionate and beautiful and intense. And then, at the same time, he also wanted to be Grover: the focus of that passion, of that beauty, of that intensity. It was like knowing an eclipse was happening above you, but not having the tools to safely gaze at it.

Percy was an eclipse Jason would willingly blind himself for.

His thumb tapped the 'call' button before he could stop himself.

And then he hit 'end' before the possibility could suffocate him.

Jason pressed the corner of his phone into his cheek and the heel of his hand into his eye. His glasses shoved up into his hair. It was too quiet. Even Jupiter's monotonous panting wasn't enough. He needed the TV on, music blaring in his ears. He needed Percy to ask, “Ready for an adventure?”

Jason's arms settled against his sides. The hallway to his right was dark even with the dull lighting of the kitchen. His mom's urn sat on the counter as it always did, the weight of a human body compiled in an elegant jar. Jason stared at it.

In the back of his imagination, Jason imagined his own body being cremated in waves of fire. His remains dusted into a container. The container being set on a countertop. Remaining on that countertop for years until the next person died.

His life had become a countertop.

Jason closed his eyes.

He opened them.

And then he went to the cupboard to find his Xanax.

**

Jason woke on the couch to a cramped neck and a TV infomercial for minted American coins. The living room was unnervingly dark, brightened only by the saturated colors of the television and the occasional flash of white. Jason squinted at the light, holding up a hand to shield his eyes as he fumbled for his phone.

The phone screen read a quarter after three. Jason slumped back against the back of the couch. Jupiter was lying on the floor off to his right, his paws twitching as he slept. Jason let himself watch for a moment before standing and shuffling his way to the kitchen. His mouth felt like cotton and his neck was still horribly stiff.

Squinting in preparation for the kitchen light, Jason flicked the switch.

Something with long, crooked arms and no face stood at the fridge.

Jason screamed.

“Shit!” Thalia shouted because there had been no creature with crooked arms at the fridge. It had only been Thalia, had been Thalia all along, dressed in a black tank-top and a silver pair of boxer shorts. She had been holding a tall glass of milk, which was now a half-filled glass of milk. The rest of the glass' containments were on the kitchen floor.

“Sorry,” Jason tried to say, but he could only manage a garbled sound. He could have sworn he–

And then Thalia made a face at him that involved a scowl and a flick of her tongue up to her left canine tooth, an expression she had been making since she was seven-years-old and had had to have an extra tooth removed. Jason relaxed.

“Sorry,” he said.

Thalia set the glass on the counter. Her right arm was dripping. “Hand me a paper towel?”

Jason did and helped her clean the floor.

There was something odd about the incident that Jason couldn't name even as he surrendered himself to his bedroom and pulled his cross necklace over his head. It wasn't even what he'd thought he'd seen that had been the strange part. It was... But it slipped Jason's mind.

He clutched the cross, stared up at his ceiling, and whispered a prayer to St. Michael until he fell asleep.

**

Marty's was a diner just a few miles west of the Grace Ranch. It had a flickering red sign above it which boasted the restaurant's name as best as it could and an aging parchment-colored sign in the left front window which read _Rated New York's Finest Apple Pie 1967!_ in block letters.

Inside, the walls were an obnoxiously checkered pattern of pink and white and the tops of the counters were as red as candied apples that had melted to the pavement in an autumn heatwave. The air smelled at once like every other American diner, but with the added sharpness of cologne of teenage boys.

Everyone who came into Marty's could agree that it was the best place to have breakfast or lunch or dinner in the tiny town of Greenwood. And everyone who left Marty's couldn't quite remember having been anywhere else for breakfast or lunch or dinner to compare it to.

In the back of Marty's, Jason fried multiple foods on a minimum wage salary. He fried onion rings, french fries, Oreos, and dough. He cooked hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and to his greatest dismay several hot-dogs on a daily basis. Sometimes at five or at seven or at nine, Jason would leave the back of Marty's and would be replaced by another blond boy whose name he could never remember. And then he would drive home and eat carbs and go to sleep and wake up and eat carbs and drive to Marty's and fry onion rings and french fries and Oreos and dough and cook hamburgers and cheeseburgers and several hot dogs and at five or at seven or at nine he would go home and eat carbs and sleep and wake up and eat carbs and drive to Marty's and–

Jason filled a basket with onion rings and slid it over the top of the counter in the tiny serving window. The tiny window was blanketed by a small curtain of an obnoxious pink and white checkered pattern. It was parted at the sides like the living room window of a dollhouse.

Jason hit the bell beside the curtain. Immediately, a hand appeared to take the basket. Sometimes the hand had dark skin. Sometimes the hand had brown skin. Sometimes the hand had light skin. Sometimes the hand had no skin at all.

It was almost five or seven or nine and Jason's eyes were starting to close as he half-heartedly flipped a hamburger or a cheeseburger or a hot dog. But no, this time it was a grilled cheese because he was making it for himself. He had grown tired of the carbs at home and had decided to destroy his arteries another way.

He was running low on Xanax. He would have to call the doctor for another prescription. Jason couldn't quite remember the last time he had seen his doctor. He couldn't quite remember having a doctor. He couldn't quite remember that morning either.

Jason flipped the grilled cheese.

He had burned one side of it and that enough was capable of bringing Jason back just a little bit more until the spatula looked too real in his hand. The grease seemed impossibly shiny. He was strangely aware of having limbs.

And then Frank, Jason's co-worker, was beside him asking, “You okay?”

The answer was no, but the reminder of Frank was an interruption he needed. Without Frank, he would have kept frying and then at five or seven or nine he would go home and eat carbs and sleep and–

“Do you want one?” Jason asked, to be polite, but also to say something. To remind himself he was there. He felt at once impossible and stupid. He had always been doing this, frying at Marty's. If not for a living then during the summers. Then why now did the grill look so close to his eyes and why now were his hands shaking and why now couldn't he stop focusing on what kind of expression his face was making?

“Nah,” Frank said, scrunching his eyebrows. Frank was a large man, although “man” didn't seem to be the right word for him either. He was a year younger than Jason, but he was taller, broader, and chubbier. He would've made for an intimidating bouncer if Greenwood had any nightclubs aside from the seedy glory hole the town pretended not to know about between the gas station and St. Thomas Church.

Frank said something else that Jason hadn't quite heard. When he had thought about the glory hole the town pretended not to know about, the thought had lent itself to a series of other thoughts the town didn't know about and the majority of them involved beautiful hands, intense eyes, and a passionate mouth.

“What?” Jason asked. He was burning his grilled cheese.

“I said I'm lactose intolerant,” said Frank. He shook his head as if to emphasize his condition. “Wish I could though. Dairy's the best when it isn't making me... well, you know.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed. “When it isn't making you...”

He stared at the bright orange color of the processed cheese as it oozed out the sides of the frying sandwich. Abruptly, he had remembered a conversation he'd had with his mom his Freshman year of college. He'd only been half-listening as she talked about something involving Thalia and bodily functions he hadn't wanted to ever hear before. He'd been working on a paper for his Intro to Literary Studies class and he had wanted to make a good impression on his professor. He hadn't been able to care, what with his future and his paper and his grade and his ADHD, about his sister's body aches because she drank–

“Milk,” Jason said to the small window.

The grilled cheese had blackened and was beginning to smoke.

“Dude,” Frank said slowly. “Are you sure you're okay? You're kind of freaking me out.”

Jason scooped the sandwich with his spatula and then threw it in the garbage.

It was exactly seven when Will arrived in the kitchen, impeccably happy with blond hair and hazel eyes, ready to take Jason's place. Jason let him have it, mechanically clocking out and then heading for his car. With each passing step, anxiety filled his feet and his legs and his gut and his chest and his heart and his head and his brain. But it wasn't the anxiety that came with a panic attack, the icy tips of unexplained terror that willed him into a gasping organism afraid of itself. This was the anxiety that came before Jason hit play on an EMF reader, the anxiety that came with starting a new chapter of one of his stories, the anxiety that came at the vibration of his phone when he knew it was Percy.

It was the anxiety of potential.

Jason threw himself into the driver's seat of his station wagon. He didn't need to look at his phone to find the number. He didn't choke on the possibilities this time. Because now, Jason knew what had been missing. It wasn't that Greenwood was a place of suburban monotony, a phone line out of order, a counter holding an urn. It was that Greenwood was a place of suburban monotony, a phone line out of order, a counter holding an urn when Percy wasn't there to make it horrible and terrific and magical. Without Percy in the woods, all Jason could hear was the sound of the other voices: _I see you_.

It had to be that Percy felt it too. That awful _awfulness_. The _deadness_ of the town without Jason there. Because that was what Jason felt. Without–

The sign for Marty's glowed, flickered, glowed, flickered, glowed overhead.

The phone rang five times, six.

Jason closed his eyes.

There was the briefest of scuffling sounds.

And then, from the other end of the phone, Percy snapped, “ _What?_ ”

Jason felt so relieved at once that his stomach threatened to up-heave. “Hey,” he said. And then, unable to keep from smiling, he asked, “Wanna go on an adventure?”

 


	25. make up

Percy was standing in the doorway of the camper when Jason pulled up. His face was illuminated by the glow of a battery-operated lamp sitting just inside. It made him look both breathtaking and frightening in the quiet of the field.  
  
It was too cold for the cicadas to hum, too cold for crickets to chirp. There was nothing but silence and the low rumble of the station wagon. When Jason turned off the car and pulled himself out of the driver's seat, Percy didn't shift or move. He was a dark statue framed in a halo of red light.

They had spoken briefly over the phone, but not enough for Jason to believe Percy forgave him. It was why his steps slowed as he trailed through the knee-high grass. It was why his hands trailed up and into themselves, balling in a double-fist at his waist. It was why he came to a stop in the darkness of Percy's ominous shadow, looking up into his expressionless face.

"I'm sorry," Jason began, his voice quiet but also loud in the October night. They were so alone out here.

Percy's eyebrows furrowed.

Jason swallowed. He continued, "I shouldn't have said what I did. It wasn't-- It wasn't right, of me or otherwise. I mean, it was a shitty thing for you to say--" Percy's eyebrows got closer together. "--But it was an even shittier way for me to react. You've always been… You've always-- You're intuitive with things and you analyze things and you're always looking for the greater-- the _supernatural_ in it. And when you find it, I tend to not believe you because it just doesn't seem-- I don't want to believe it, Percy. It has nothing to do with-- You're not delusional."

Percy still didn't move.

Jason didn't know what else to say. He licked his lips. "I don't know what else to say."

"How about," Percy said, and at his voice Jason felt alive again, "I'm always right and you're always wrong?"

"You're always right," Jason said. "I should always listen to you. I'm always wrong."

"And that you only ever hang out with me when it benefits you," Percy said.

"And I only ever-- Wait. Percy, that's not true."

"It is," Percy said. His shoulders were set, but his voice was wavering. "It's why you're here now, right? 'Cause you realized your sister isn't your sister. 'Cause she's still missing. And now you need your crazy cryptid-believing friend to be your Giles and help you out. Well, news for you, Jason, but I'm not a book. I have feelings."

Jason's stomach was turning over and over. He couldn't remember walking, but Percy was suddenly there in front of him elevated by the camper and the brick step. "I know that," he said. "I know that. I'm sorry."

"Are you?" Percy asked and his face which had previously been emotionless now contained every emotion Jason could name. "Or are you just sorry that this didn't go the way that you wanted? That you didn't get to have your sister back and then put me back into your little fun-box for later when you got bored again."

"I'm sorry," Jason whispered.

"I don't think we should be friends," Percy croaked.

Jason knew this. Jason didn't want to know this.

"I can change," he said, suddenly desperate. Not for the adventure, not for his sister. "I can change. I'll support you. I'll listen."

Percy was shaking his head. At some point, they had both started crying. It wasn't the type of crying that lended itself to romantic movies, but the ugly crying of two boys in an empty field. One of them had their arms crossed, another had theirs down at their sides.

"You were right about Main Street," Jason said in lieu of another apology. 

This gained Percy's attention. His green eyes were lakes, his upper lip wet from his running nose. He swiped at it with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

"I can't drive down there," continued Jason. "I can't smell gasoline. Even going to that hospital-- I can see her. I wasn't there, but it's like my brain just turns on a movie and I can hear the nurse's voice. They said the truck that hit her had to have run over her four or five times. She wasn't even a body anymore. They couldn't make her look  _ human _ ."

Jason pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, then down his face. His cheeks were too warm. His jacket was suffocating him. "I hear the nurse's voice every day. I see her mangled body every day. I can't make it stop. I have dreams. I can't--"

It was quiet save for their ragged breaths.

Percy sniffed wetly and said, "Crazy piece of shit."

It was like a dog's bite and Jason welcomed it. He said, "I know."

Percy stepped off to the side. Jason stepped up onto the brick. And then he was inside the camper. 

Part of him had expected to see Percy's walls -- his newspaper clippings, his highlighted passages, his photographs, and drawings -- to be torn down in some kind of fit of passion. But they were still there, connected by red strings. It calmed him. Percy was still Percy.

And Percy's arms were no longer folded over his chest.

They were even.

They were okay.

Jason said, "Tell me what you know about changelings."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I intended to make this chapter longer, but I liked where it ended so I'll stop here for now and then upload more either later today or maybe by Sunday.


	26. the fae

Jason had tried to sit as close as he could to Percy's space-heater. A draft was coming in from the door and it was making him shudder as he watched Percy flip through spiral notebooks and library books across from him.

Occasionally, Percy would make a frustrated sound, rub his eyes, and then return to one of the notebooks. Jason watched quietly. Percy had offered him a can of cold soup and he was oddly relishing in the taste of seasoned green beans even if they were a little icy. Finally, Percy laid down the drawing he had made of the two dark figures between them.

“Alright, so,” he began, tapping the paper. “We can agree these are the _sidhe._ Or the fae.”

Jason didn't like the idea of a fairy looking like something out of one of his Prozac-induced nightmares, but he had to agree it was the only thing that made sense. In the second before he'd seen Thalia in the kitchen, he had seen something else. And if it wasn't Thalia, then the only thing that made sense was–

“Changelings usually come in three different types,” said Percy. “There's the baby changeling where the fairies take the human child and replace it with a fairy child. Kind of like cuckoo birds. Then there are old fairies who can't take care of themselves so they disguise themselves as children or a person's loved ones. And then there's the stick.”

Jason stopped eating. “The what?”

“Fairies would take a human baby and replace it with a piece of wood or a stick,” Percy said. “Either because they just wanted the child and didn't have one of their own. Or because it was a prank. Fairies like to pull pranks.”

“A stick isn't a very convincing replacement for a kid,” Jason said slowly.

“I think,” Percy said, “glamour made the parents blind to it.”

“Glamour? Like the magazine?”

“No. Glamour's like... It's a common power of fairies in a lot of different folktales.” Percy gestured to the books scattered across his mattress. “The fairies let you see only what they want you to see. Like in stories where a man is tricked into following a beautiful woman and then she turns out to be a hag or a skeleton or something. It's like that.”

“Like how I can see Thalia as Thalia,” Jason suggested.

“Exactly,” said Percy. “The only way you can actually, like, _see them_ see them is by making a disenchanting salve and wiping your eyes with it.”

Jason asked, “And how do you make that?”

“One story said something about eel fat. Another one suggests four-leaf clovers.”

“Should we,” Jason asked, “should we make one?”

“Would you rather see your sister or something with spaghetti arms?”

Jason ate his soup. “So what should we do about the changeling?”

“We have to confuse it in order to get it to reveal itself,” said Percy. “Once the changeling reveals itself, it usually leaves.”

“Why?”

Percy shrugged.

“So how do we confuse it?”

“We have to cook something in an eggshell.”

“What?”

Percy spread his hands. “That's what most of the stories say to do. It confuses them.”

“It's confusing _me_ ,” Jason said. “How do you cook something in an eggshell?”

“Same way you'd cook something with a pot,” Percy suggested, “except smaller.”

Jason set the empty can of soup aside so it wouldn't get knocked over. “Alright, so in the morning we'll set out and do the egg thing.”

“Deal,” Percy said, putting the books and notebooks away beneath his mattress. The sleeves of his sweatshirt kept slipping down over his elbows. “What time should I meet you?”

“Oh,” said Jason. Because he hadn't really thought of going home after this. Because he hadn't really thought about going home to his sister who wasn't really his sister. The idea of sleeping in his room with something-- with a fae lurking in his doorway with no face made his stomach coil and trip over itself.

Percy seemed to read his expression. “Well,” he said, and looked pointedly at the mattress, “you could stay the night here if you want.”

And so Jason did.

Jason had been over to Percy's camper multiple times over the course of the last three years that he'd known him. But he had never actually slept in it before. It was probably for the best in hindsight now that Jason was currently attempting to get comfortable under the blankets in such a cramped space.

For one person, the camper would have been too small, but for two people it was downright tiny. In any case, Percy slipped beneath the two comforters and three bed sheets as if it were nothing while Jason struggled and struggled and then finally collapsed against a pillow that smelled like Percy's hair. Percy had turned off the battery-operated light they had been using, but he still had twinkle lights lining the window and the walls.

Jason tried not to think about how close Percy was to him or about the warmth of his shoulder brushing Jason's or about Percy's left calf laying very close to his own. Instead, he tried to focus on some of the stories Percy had taped up on his wall. Not all of them were about cryptid animals or supernatural beings. A lot of them had to do with wildlife, sea animals, and plants. Although Jason did catch sight of an older newspaper clipping from five years ago about a missing girl in the town of Naples only a couple of miles away.

He read partway through it when he thought he saw Percy looking at him out of the corner of his eye. And when he glanced over, he found Percy really was looking at him. He was turned, face half pressed into one of his pillows, so his unwavering stare didn't carry as much intimidation with it as usual. On the contrary, he looked dangerously intimate. Jason swallowed.

“I'm sorry,” Percy whispered.

“For what?” Jason asked, his voice just as quiet. The wind groaned against the windows of the camper. Percy's eyelashes were incredibly long.

“For never saying sorry,” Percy said. “About what I said in the car.”

“You don't have to apologize.”

“I want to.” Percy licked his lips. “I get caught up in things. It's easy for me to forget that I should use more tact when I talk. I'm sorry for saying what I said.”

“I'm sorry more,” Jason said. “I pulled a Triton and it wasn't fair to you.”

Percy reached up hesitantly as if he were approaching a rabbit. And then, ever so carefully, he brushed a lock of blond hair from Jason's face. Jason's breath caught in his throat. This felt dangerous.

“You didn't pull a Triton,” Percy said. His voice was low, scratchy. “Because you apologized.”

Jason's lips quirked at the joke. “I'm sorry your brother's a dirtbag.”

“I'm sorry your sister's a changeling,” said Percy.

For some reason, that set the two of them off laughing. It felt good to laugh. And when they settled again, Jason felt more comfortable in the small space of the camper than he had before. His heart was going too fast. Percy was too close to his face. His eyes were too soft.

“Percy,” he said. He couldn't quite breathe.

Then ever so lightly, ever so gently, Percy's hand found his beneath the blankets.

And he could breathe again.

 


	27. Chapter 27

Those who believed midnight to be the witching hour had never been awake at five in the morning. The stars had been engulfed in black, their fires swallowed by the promise of a day that had yet to wake itself. Dew petaled the grass and ghosted over car windshields. Silence trailed through the streets, the roads, the farms, the houses. Day creatures slumbered, night creatures settled. It was the pregnant moment from which the universe was born.

On the east side of Greenwood, NY an old, rusting station wagon pulled into a gravel driveway. Two boys emerged from the car, one broad and careful, the other wiry and wild. They met each other's eyes. They shut the car doors. They headed for the porch of the one-story home of Jason Grace.

The windows of the house were dark, but Jason knew the home wasn't empty. His blood was hot in his face. His heart thundered in his ears. They were doing this. They were _doing_ this.

As they got to the front step, Jason turned to Percy. The other boy was carrying the shovel they'd used just days before to dig at the potential graves in the woods. Percy wasn't holding it now to dig for bodies.

"You should wait out here," Jason said. He didn't want to mean it. The idea of facing off with something that could be a fae or something else, something that was wearing his sister's skin, made fear pinch at his nerves. But if something happened inside, if he was unsuccessful with making the creature vanish, he wanted someone else to be there to take it down manually.

Percy looked just as concerned by Jason's idea. His eyebrows were doing something complicated and there were lines on the sides of mouth. Jason's eyes dropped to them and away. His skin still burned from the night before. His heart was sated, but his body wasn't. And Percy looked fair and fierce and lovely with tentative violence in his eyes.

"Do you remember the ritual?" Percy asked.

Jason thought back to earlier that morning. They'd slept in the camper, but barely, and left just an hour before to steal a freshly laid egg from one of the neighboring farms. Jason was holding the egg now, cupping it gently in his palm. It was a soft brown color. "I remember," he said.

Percy nodded. Then he turned and stood against the side of the door, a sentinel.

Jason took a shaky breath. He closed his eyes.

 _If you fail_ , he thought, _she's gone forever._

He thought of the long, long, long arms of the faceless shadow.

He thought of the long, long, long moments of holding Percy's hands beneath the blankets.

Jason opened his eyes. He opened the door.

The inside of the house felt exactly like it had the day before and the day before that and the day before that. The air was warm from the heater. The kitchen smelled vaguely of dog. Jason was reminded suddenly of the haunted houses he used to read about as a child. They never did feel haunted when you first walked in.

He eyed the doorway to the hall as he carefully assembled what he needed on the dining room table. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the gray shadow of Percy's back behind the window blinds.

Jason set up the small, makeshift egg-stand he and Percy had made from metal wires. It looked oddly enough like two Easter egg dippers fused together. On the edge of the sink, he cracked the chicken egg as carefully as he could. Sweat beaded along his upper lip, in the collar of his neck. The egg cracked along the center.

Trying to salvage the larger half of the shell, Jason let the egg white and yolk _plop_ into the garbage disposal before returning to the egg-stand. He placed the bottom of the shell in the center. Beneath it, he placed a tea light. He lit the tea light, his hands shaking.

And then he poured chicken stock into the shell.

Then tiny chopped onions.

Tiny chopped peppers.

What he produced would be inedible to a human. But Percy had assured him he wouldn't have to eat it.

Thalia would.

Jason carefully stirred the small, small soup with a toothpick. He felt ridiculous. It didn't quite feel like a ritual.

Rituals, to Jason, consisted of multiple candles and Latin words and ancient symbols drawn in blood. But when Jason asked Percy if they should be speaking in "Irish or something" over the egg shell while he made the soup, Percy had shot a _nasty_ look and promptly informed him that Irish was a _language_ and not a means of _shoddy Hollywood witchcraft_.

Still, Jason couldn't help the part of him that stared at a floating piece of onion and muttered, " _Coctivus_."

The onion bobbed.

Nothing happened.

Jason watched the egg for another moment, listening for the sounds of Not-Thalia waking up for school. Then he closed his eyes and did what Percy _had_ told him to do.

"The egg means nothing without intention," Percy had told him as they'd driven away from the farm. The egg was still warm in his hand from the chicken's protective weight. "As you cook with it, you have to charge it with intention."

Jason imagined his sister.

He imagined her toothless grin when she was five, her happy laugh as they climbed trees together, her sparkling eyes when he would tell her a story. His memory swung like a pendulum between childhood and adulthood. Thalia on her skateboard, pride in her voice as she showed him the gore of her arm. Thalia in the driver's seat of the station wagon, swearing at him as it stalled. Thalia in the window, looking at him with betrayal and hatred and despair as he drove away for college. Thalia.

 _Thalia_.

As Jason reflected on the memories, he imagined light filling the egg shell, filling the makeshift soup. Light, golden and orange-flecked. All the joy he felt as a child, all the hurt he felt now. What he and Thalia had, this thing, this changeling, couldn't have it.

 _You can't have it_.

Jason opened his eyes.

And startled, hard.

Because there was Thalia. But not there in the hallway. She was _there_ , in _front_ of him, in front of him across the _table_ , her shoulders _hunched_ and back _curled_ and hands on the table so her eyes were level with his. The egg was the only thing separating them. Jason hadn't heard her come in, approach, lean toward him. His stomach lurched horribly.

"What are you doing?" Thalia asked. Her voice was curious, childlike, but it was slightly deeper. Because it wasn't really her voice.

Jason couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe.

This was not ghost hunting.

This was not Bigfoot.

Thalia's eyes turned from the egg to Jason in an odd, wobbly way no human would move their eyes.

"Making breakfast," Jason whispered.

Thalia looked at the egg again and tilted her head. Her hair was mussed from sleep. A t-shirt hung from her shoulders.

"Do you want to try it?" Jason asked. His voice was still low. He couldn't seem to make it normal. His hands were shaking.

"It looks gross," Thalia said dismissively.

Jason's spine prickled. "It's not," he assured her, trying to sound pleasant. He forced a smile. Sweat dripped down his face. "I promise." He gently took the egg from the tiny, tiny flame.

Thalia didn't flinch away from him. Still, she asked, "Why are you making it that way?"

Jason fished for answers. "It's how mom used to make it," he lied. If this had really been Thalia, she would have recoiled. Jason had never been home to see the foul things said to Thalia by their mother, but he knew it was enough to make his sister hate him for the love he still felt for her. But because this wasn't Thalia, he saw the creature's shoulders move uncertainly.

 _That's right_ , Jason thought. _Play human, you bastard_.

As if reading his thoughts, Not-Thalia glanced at him again. For a moment, Jason thought she was going to leave, to break the egg, to spit in Jason's face.

But then she took the egg shell from his fingers.

And drank.


	28. come away o human child

The kitchen seemed all at once too quiet. Or, perhaps, Thalia's gasp had been much too loud.

Jason was instantly reminded of the sound his childhood friend Nico would make during an asthma attack: a horrible, dragging inhale that at once made him recoil while also urging him to action. But this was not Nico. And so Jason watched in horror as the thing that was Thalia but was not Thalia choked and inhaled dry and aching and awful, the sound of pneumonia patients, of banshees, of the dying.

Jason couldn't stand it.

But then, just as he was about to shout, to beg, to scream for her to stop...

She did.

Thalia was staring at him now, her face chillingly blank. Her arms hung limply at her sides. But where her eyes had once been Thalia's icy blue color they were now a deep black. They were unnerving to look at, unearthly, inhuman, but not altogether terrible. This was not, Jason hastily reminded himself, a demon. Still, he clutched at the small, silver cross in his pocket if not to call on faith, then to ease his anxiety.

“Hello?” he asked, voice quiet as if the creature wearing Thalia's face were in the other room rather than here.

Thalia was silent. And then she let out a long, long, _long_ sigh. Then she said something in a language Jason didn't understand. It wasn't Latin, but definitely something old. Jason asked, just as quiet as before, “I'm sorry?”

“ _Clever_ ,” hissed Thalia, her lip curling into an eerie smile as if she weren't quite sure how to make the right expression, “ _boy_.”

A chill ran down Jason's spine. Like before, Thalia's voice was her own, but it was mixed with something deeper. Not quite a man's voice, but not his sister's. Jason thought back to the stories Percy had told him in the camper before they left that morning for the farm. But the questions the people asked in the stories didn't really seem to suit his purpose. Jason didn't care how old this thing was, he didn't care about finding gold. He only cared about one thing.

“Where is my sister?” Jason asked. His voice wavered in spite of himself, but it was impossible for him to feel safe in his own kitchen with Thalia's dark, dark eyes staring unblinkingly at him.

Thalia's smile turned to a sneer. “ _Not so clever_ ,” she said.

Jason asked again, anger making his voice more even, “Where?”

The creature let out a laugh that was oddly pretty in spite of the horrible way it was making his sister's neck bend to look at him. And then, to Jason's unease, she began to sing. “ _Where dips the rocky highland of Sleuth Wood in the lake, there lies a leafy island where flappy herons wake the drowsy water rats; there we've hid our faery vats full of berrys and of reddest stolen cherries. Come away o human child! To the waters and the wild with a faery, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand_.”

Jason frowned, thinking back to his first year in English. “Yeats,” he said finally. Then, “That's not an answer.”

Thalia let out another tinkling laugh. “ _Boring, boring,_ ” she said. “ _Not so clever._ ”

Rage began to fray the tips of Jason's patience, but before he could shout, another voice came over his shoulder. “Tír na hÓige.”

Jason looked up to see Percy standing beside him, the door ajar and the shovel held loosely in his hands. He didn't appear threatened by Thalia's odd posture, but his face looked pensive.

Thalia's eyes danced across his form. “ _Cheater_ , _cheater,_ ” she finally said, but she sounded more amused than upset. “ _L_ _eannán sí_.” The last part Jason didn't understand, but Percy's eyebrows crept closer together like he understood the words but not the meaning.

“What's Tiernan Og?” Jason asked, his eyes darting between Thalia and Percy. He was glad for Percy's stable presence, but the partially opened door made him wary about the creature possible escape.

“The fairy world,” said Percy, “more or less.” Then he asked, “Why'd you take her?”

Thalia sneered again. “ _Given_ ,” she growled, “ _not taken_.”

Jason abruptly stood from the table, making Percy break eye-contact with Thalia since the first time he came in. “By who?” he asked, voice echoing in the kitchen.

“ _Clever_ _boy_ ,” Thalia said, but she didn't seem to be directing it at him.

Jason asked, “Do you know his name?”

Thalia made a spitting sound. Then she began to sing again, “ _Come away o human child! To the waters and the wild_ \--”

“His name,” Percy said.

Thalia eyed him. “ _Saxon_ ,” she finally replied.

Jason was ready to implode, but Percy gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “She doesn't know,” he muttered.

But then Thalia said in a voice that was neither her own nor the creatures, “ _I see you._ ”

And Percy's hand was no longer comforting.

Jason looked over at the faery again, his eyes cataloging its face within his sister's. “What,” he whispered, “did you say?”

“ _I see you_ ,” said the faery. The voice was the same. The exact... “ _I see you_ ,” the faery sung again. “ _I see you. I see you._ ” Jason knew he had recognized the voice in the woods. And hearing it now, he couldn't believe it had taken him this long to realize.

“Jason?” Percy asked.

“Bryce gives you the kids,” Jason said. Suddenly, every theory Percy had suggested circled into place, except it wasn't aliens. It was a terrible, 17-year-old boy. “What do you give him in return?”

The faery was silent, its face beginning to twitch. Percy was carefully making his way away from the partially open door. How long did the ritual last for? How much longer did they have control over this thing?

“ _Fun!_ ” Thalia guffawed abruptly. “ _Great fun!_ ”

And then she began to jack-knife. Her body spasmed and contorted in awful positions, seizing while she stood, a puppet whose master had lost control of the strings. And then her eyes became too big for her face as if something were trying to break free from them and her arms grew long and misshapen. The longer Jason stared, the more he couldn't tell if what he was seeing was something gruesome and hideous or something grotesquely beautiful like a caesarian section.

Thalia made a guttural sound. She was all long, tall limbs and wide, gaping eyes.

And then she sprang for the door.

Percy didn't stop her but actually fell to the floor in his haste to get away. Jason couldn't blame him. It took several minutes for either of them to simply breathe normally. The world was slowly coming to life outside the door. The sounds of the birds nearly drowned out the sounds of their ragged breathing.

Percy kicked the shovel away from him, sitting up and looking to where Thalia had been standing as if he couldn't quite believe his eyes. Then he looked up to Jason and asked, “What now?”

Jason could still hear Thalia whispering in Bryce's voice, soft and low and dangerous. “Now,” he said, feeling uncharacteristically brave, “we crash a Halloween party.”

 


	29. the party

It seemed pointless to go to work knowing that Bryce Lawrence was behind the disappearance of the five teenagers in Greenwood as well as his sister, but Jason still had a mortgage to pay as well as the medical bills of his faux-sister and Percy still lived in a camper and needed money just to stay alive.

And so, with the sun peeking up through the clouds and the frosty morning air biting into their ears, Jason drove Percy to work and then drove himself to Marty's. The day was long and tiresome, but Jason tried to come up with a plan while he flipped cheeseburgers on the grill.

Percy had said that the fae were tricksters. It explained Thalia's answer about what Bryce got in return for giving them teenagers. But still, something seemed off about it. Missing people weren't entertaining enough to amuse an entire legion of ancient creatures. Faeries liked to turn people around in the woods, to replace their children with sticks. They had dark senses of humor, but the humor was there.

Jason couldn't see the humor in a missing person.

Which had to mean there was something more he wasn't seeing.

“Onion rings,” Dakota muttered as he pinned an order up to the window.

Jason made onion rings.

**

By the time the sun unraveled down into the shadows of the earth once more, Jason Grace still didn't have a plan. In his defense, neither did Percy, who quickly pulled the dark green visor from his curls the moment he slumped into the passenger seat of the station wagon.

Neither of them was dressed for a party. Jason still smelled like fryer oil. But the promise of finding Thalia, of really finding Thalia, and getting to the end of this entire mystery had him flooring the accelerator toward the west side of Greenwood without care or thought.

Percy had the passenger window open, his hand holding onto the roof of the car as he stared out into the dark. Corn grew and reached for him along the sides of the road. Clouds covered the sky, covering the stars with black gauzy mist.

“He's not just going to answer all your questions,” Percy said as they neared the edge of the town. An odd kind of feeling not quite like anxiety was creeping at the back of Jason's neck, but he knew it was only the familiar feeling of Greenwood pulling him back.

“I know,” said Jason. His eyes darted along the road looking for raccoons and possums. “But I don't need him to. The faery said Thalia was in Tiernan Og or wherever. Right? We know that's at the faery ring.”

Truthfully, they didn't need to go to Bryce in order to find Thalia. But Jason didn't like the make a move before he could see the entire board. If Thalia was only one of the teenagers to have gone missing, then the others must be in the faery world as well. What Jason needed to know was why they were there and how to get them back. Percy might know a little about Irish mythology, but this was Greenwood, NY, a place where boys shot their old dogs out back and the only interesting tales were those of the snowstorms of five or seven or 15 years ago. Jason knew there would be no beauty in the future of anything here, fae or not.

“We're going there so you can kick his ass,” Percy said accusingly.

“No,” Jason argued. Although it had crossed his mind multiple times, Jason didn't find the idea of breaking several knuckles on a boy's jaw pleasant. “I want to know how he got there.” He waved his hand. “I got sent into the woods by messing up one of the rings. Do we have to sit in the ring and call to the fae? Does he have some kind of magic spell? Does he use runes?”

Percy frowned out into the night. It took every last bit of Jason's resolve not to tear his eyes from the road to look at him. His collarbone was sleek and delicate looking in the shadows of the car and Jason ached to touch it.

“I don't think there's ever really been a specific way to go out and find the fae,” Percy finally said. He shifted in his seat as he thought and for a moment Jason was scared he was cold, but he had merely been repositioning to better use his hands to speak. Percy had always been a physical speaker. “I mean, there've been warnings not to go out looking for them. At one point, there was a story about a writer or a professor or a scholar or something going out to investigate, to try to find the fae, and he ended up being caught in like... a time loop. I guess. I don't know.”

Jason frowned out into the headlights on the road and then glanced at his gas light and frowned some more. “Are you saying if we go to the faery world we could get stuck there?”

“In all fairness,” said Percy, “you can get stuck anywhere.”

“Okay, but in all fairness, does 'anywhere' involve the woods and faeries using us for slaves?”

“The fae don't actually have slaves,” Percy argued.

“My question stands.”

“Possibly,” Percy said. He licked his lips. “But would it be worth it? To find Thalia?”

Jason thought about it. For heroic purposes, he wanted to say yes. But realistically, both he and Thalia being on the side of the faery world wouldn't help anybody. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. He could see flashing lights along a high, sloping hill in the distance and he knew they were close to Bryce's annual Halloween bash. His stomach was beginning to drop. This was a terrible idea.

Jason glanced over at Percy. The other boy was still staring at him. Jason said, “I'm willing to try.”

Percy nodded once.

Jason tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel as the road gradually turned from dirt to gravel. Up ahead, a large white farmhouse loomed on a hill surrounded by dried and dying cornstalks that should have bee green and ripened in the Autumn chill. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of people surrounding the lawn dancing and drinking and laughing. Jason thought back to when he'd angrily picked up Thalia from this same party the year before.

 _I'll find you_ , he thought. _I'll bring you back._

They parked the station wagon along the stretch of road that was already drowned with dangerous looking sports cars and rusted looking farm trucks. Anyone above the drinking age and with a penchant for danger in Greenwood was always at Bryce Lawrence's parties and anyone under the drinking age and a penchant for survival knew to keep their mouths shut while they chugged their liquor. But it wasn't liquor that was the most damaging substance in the home of Bryce Lawrence.

Jason pulled himself from the driver's side of the car and stared up, up at the house and then searched the walking path to the black, wiry gates keeping it closed off to the rest of the town, to the rest of the world. A pair of security guards stood by just as Jason had suspected. He had no plans for them, no clever moves that would get them in and out. In this situation, Jason thought, the truth was the best weapon to have.

Percy bumped his shoulder as they made their way up the walk. The air smelled like frost and trees in that way the approaching winter often did.

Jason pulled his eyes from the dark smudges of the security guards. He swallowed hard. And then carefully draped his hand at his side. The cold air bit at his skin. And then the warmth of Percy's fingers trapped them and they were palm to palm. Jason swallowed again, but this time because his heart was stuck in his throat.

“Fairy lover,” Percy said.

In the moment, Jason was too preoccupied with the sweat-slick stickiness of Percy's hand to realize Percy was saying something that was strange. He asked, “What?”

“ _L_ _eannán sí_ ,” said Percy. “It means fairy lover.”

Jason realized Percy was talking about what Thalia had called him earlier that morning. “Fairy lover,” he said. “As in someone who loves fairies?”

“No,” Percy said, but before Jason could ask again, a flashlight blinded him.

For a brief moment, it was as if they were back in the woods that first night and the police were there to arrest them for murder. But then a security guard's voice shouted, “Can't be up here!”

“We're here for the party,” Percy tried, squinting in the light. His hand had tightened in Jason's grip and Jason was grateful for it.

“Party's full,” barked the guard. “Invitation only.”

“We have an invitation,” Jason said. Percy looked at him. They did not have an invitation. The guars seemed just as unamused. “Go ahead and call your boss yourself. Tell him Jason Grace is here to see him.”

The guard stared. Then rolled his eyes heavily and yanked up a radio from his shirt. With the flashlight held off to the side, Jason could see the guard couldn't have been much older than he was. A little wider, but certainly not much older. They could have been cousins. The guard muttered something into the radio to whoever was on the other line. He said Jason's name, but he also used another word that began with F and ended with G.

A voice, almost inaudible, crackled over the radio.

“Don't know no Grace,” said the guard with disinterest.

“He knows me,” Jason insisted.

“Look, kid,” began the guard.

“Tell him we know about the rings,” demanded Jason. “Tell him the world's more full of weeping than he'll ever understand.”

The second the words were out, Jason felt himself wince. In the context of that morning, of Thalia's twisting face, the words made sense. But here, if Bryce didn't catch his meaning, he was just a boy spewing nonsense outside a rich person's house. Jason could see himself three years from now replaying this very same moment while taking a shower if only to cause himself pain.

The guard stared at him as if he were the dumbest thing he'd ever seen. And then, with a drawn-out sigh as if he didn't get paid enough for this, he relayed Jason's message into the radio. A moment passed. Two. And then a crackle came over the radio and Jason didn't need to be close to the security guard to recognize it as Bryce Lawrence's disgusting laugh.

The guard said, voice bored, “Go on in.”

Jason and Percy looked at each other.

They went inside the gate.

 


	30. Féth fíada

Jason wasn't a fan of parties. This fact didn't change when they stepped over the threshold of Bryce Lawrence's house.

Parties, specifically college parties, were rowdy things filled with contemptible people and foul-smelling pot. They weren't the parties you went to with friends where you watched each other's backs, drank vodka, and shared joints. They were the parties where strangers shifted in their circles to keep their back to you, where something else was in the vodka, and where joints were clutched possessively.

At Bryce Lawrence's party this typical roughness was accompanied by Halloween costumes in various states of disarray, menacing boys in bloody masks, and trap music so loud Jason had to tuck his head.

As they made their way through the living room, kitchen, and various hallways Jason made sure to stay connected to Percy. He'd reached out and wrapped his little finger around Percy's, holding on in fear that someone might pull Percy away and into a closet to snort something he couldn't even name.

It wasn't that Jason hated the people who enjoyed things like this. It was that, at parties like these, consent always seemed to get crushed underfoot.

Percy didn't seem as unnerved. His eyes danced from one corner of the room to another looking for Bryce. They checked upstairs, the basement, several offices, and a reading room.

"Where is he?" Jason asked. He opened each door with an increasing fervor. He was tired from the ritual that morning and tired from work, tired of grieving and tired of searching for someone who may not want to be found. But most of all, he was tired of hearing Bryce's name come up into the conversation and then letting it slide away.

He heard his voice again, in the woods. _I see you_.

Jason wanted to crush the sunken bones of Bryce Lawrence's eyes under his knuckles. The music around them got louder, or Jason's ears opened wider. Everything was both saturated in color and horrifically dark. Finally, when they seemed to be in the bowels of the house, Jason felt a small tug on his finger.

Percy had stopped at the mouth of another hallway. Jason took a step back and followed his eyes. There, at the end of a black tunnel, was a single door slightly ajar. A light flickered out from the crack. After everything since that morning, Jason was surprised he still had the ability to be unsettled.

Percy gave him a look.

Jason answered it.

They made their way down the hall.

Jason noticed there was something off about it. The music was quieter here and it smelled faintly like evergreen. Percy reached forward and gave the open door a little push.

It was a study. The light they saw was coming from a fireplace against one of the walls, a gray stone mammoth that would have been lovely at any other time of day. There were a few empty chairs and tapestries. A dark wooden desk sat near the fire.

The evergreen smell was coming from a small, smoking bowl on the desk. From where he stood, Jason couldn't tell what was inside it, but Percy muttered into his ear anyway, "Club moss."

For a moment, Jason thought the room was empty.

Then he noticed a boy laying down between two chairs pushed together, his feet propped up on one while his head was slouched down in the other. Jason didn't need to see his face to know it was Bryce.

"Finally," Bryce said, his voice thick and heavy and dragging. He was doing something weird with his hands. "I wasted my grand entrance on two random dicks I thought were you fags."

Percy made a low noise in his throat. It took Jason a second to realize he wasn't responding to being called a slur so much as he was responding to the two bodies dancing against the opposite wall. Jason knew they were bodies because of the way they were folded over.

Blood soaked through their shirts but somehow didn't get on the floor or the walls. Whenever some dropped, it floated as if there was no gravity. The blood followed the bodies as they were pulled back and forth as if on invisible strings, dancing and colliding with each other in a macabre dance.

Nausea pulled at Jason's gut and it laced eerily with something darker as his eyes followed the movements back to Bryce's hands.

He was moving them.

 _Great fun_ , the fairy wearing Thalia's said had said. _Great fun._

"What are you?" Jason whispered.

Bryce turned and looked at him. He was thrilled by this question. Flames burned behind his eyes. "What am I?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question. He only wanted to hear the words again. "I'm the king of the world, man."

Bryce waved his hand and one of the bodies did what may have been a jig if the torso didn't flop sideways. Jason was going to be sick.

Bryce said, "I'm a _god_."

A moment passed.

"You're a devil," Percy said.

The bodies dropped to the floor. Bryce stood up. He was wearing a leather jacket to match Percy's, a wolf mask shoved up into his hair. "Same thing," he said.

"Why'd you take my sister?" Jason challenged.

" _Why'd you take my sister?_ " Bryce mocked. "I didn't let you assholes in here so you could have some dumb confrontation." He lifted a strangely real looking gun and pointed it at Percy and fired.

Nothing happened.

Bryce frowned.

He lifted the gun and checked the safety, but it hadn't been on. The bullet had fired. Percy was still standing. Jason tasted acid in his mouth.

"Oh, for the love of," Bryce said and raised his hand. Percy left the ground and slammed into one of the walls. Jason yelled. Percy crumpled on the floor. Bryce turned to Jason, but when he lifted his hand Jason only slid a little across the floor.

Bryce swore. "I knew I should've waited for--"

Jason threw himself at Bryce. They tumbled to the floor. Jason threw a punch, but it hurt more than he expected it to and reeled back. Bryce slammed the butt of the gun into Jason's cheek. They pulled away from each other. Jason's head swam.

Bryce stumbled to his feet. "To answer your question," he said. He sounded drunk. "I did it because I fucking wanted to." He pointed the gun at Jason.

Jason didn't pray. He had no time.

There was just the gun and then--

Bryce folded to the ground.

Jason yanked his legs away, inhaling sharply.

Percy stood above him, a fireplace poker in his hands. It was lowered from where he'd slammed it against the back of Bryce's head.

"Is he--?" Jason began, then swore when Bryce's hand moved.   
Percy snatched the gun and pointed it at Bryce. His breathing was labored and his eyes were unfocused, but his hand was steady.

Bryce slowly rolled himself over. Blood was leaking from his head from where the end of the poker had punctured his skull. He gave a weak laugh. "You fags just won't die, will you?" he slurred.

"Why do you want to kill us?" Percy asked.

Bryce laughed again, then made a garbled sound when Percy pressed his foot down onto his chest. His eyes swam. "Triton," he choked.

Percy relieved the pressure of his foot. "What about him?"

"It was part of the deal," Bryce said. His voice sounded like gravel. His smile was gone. "He'd keep quiet about the sacrifices if I kept quiet about him."

"About him what?" Percy demanded.

"Bitch," Bryce spat.

Percy stepped harder on his chest. Jason was unsettled by the choking sounds Bryce made.

"You think those dumb," Bryce coughed, "fairy fucks would just take your whore of a mom? They were supposed to take _you_ , but they were too fucking _stupid_."

"What does that have to do with Triton?" Jason asked.

"Paid," Bryce choked.

Jason warned, "Percy."

"I don't care," Percy said, but his voice was shaking. He pointed the gun in Bryce's face. "How do we get them back?"

Bryce's face was changing color.

Percy shook the gun. " _How do we get them back?"_

"Percy, you're _choking him_."

For a terrifying moment, Percy didn't move. And then he pushed away from Bryce. The room was painfully silent aside from Bryce's labored breathing.

"The woods," Jason suggested. "We could go back to the--"

"We tried the woods," Percy shouted. His eyes were wild. His face looked-- His face was-- And then Percy walked across the room to one of the shelves lining the walls.

"Percy?" Jason asked. He tried to pull himself up from the ground, but the room spun.

"What is this?"

Jason's eyes struggled to focus, but Percy wasn't speaking to him. When he walked back to Jason, Percy shoved a small jar of something pale green in Bryce's face. Bryce's eyes swiveled this way and that before settling on the jar.

He grinned. "You won't," Bryce gave a rattling breath, "find 'em. You'll be trapped."

Percy spat in his face.

Bryce laughed. It was an eerie, airy sound.

Jason struggled to his feet as Percy pulled him up. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"The woods," Percy said.

"I thought you said--"

"I know what I said. But we've got the _féth fíada_ now."

Jason stumbled. Percy caught him. "The what?"

Percy held up the jar. Like the stone bowl, it smelled faintly like evergreen but also a little like fish. "The fairy mist."

Jason realized what he meant. They'd be able to see the fairies.


	31. hurry

In retrospect, it probably wasn't safe for either of them to drive. But because Jason couldn't see straight, it was Percy who got behind the wheel of the station wagon as they headed for the woods.

The silence of the car was too loud, too charged, after the party and Bryce's terrible voice, the bodies, the music, the bodies, the blood. Jason felt sick. He pressed his head to the car door as they sped along the dirt road. Wind licked at his face.

"Don't fall asleep," Percy warned. His knuckles were white on the wheel. Jason wasn't sure how he wasn't visibly injured, especially after slamming so hard into the wall. There was a high possibility that Percy might be internally bleeding somewhere.

"What did Bryce mean?" Jason asked. "When he said the fairies should have taken you? Why would Triton…?" He couldn't make himself say it. _Why would Triton want you dead?_  
  
Percy shook his head. The speedometer was rising, but all Jason would think about was how nice the wind felt on his face.

"Triton," Percy tried, but his voice caught. The car was quiet. Then, again, "Triton never liked me much."

"I never liked Thalia much," Jason said, struggling to keep his eyes open, "but I never tried to sacrifice her to mystical creatures."

"I don't have any fond memories of him," Percy said. "Mom always-- Well, mom always liked me better, I guess. We were into the same things. We used to go to the woods together to find plant samples and study them at home. She liked flowers the best. I liked herbs. Things like that. She always thought I was smart even though my grades weren't-- She'd tell me stories about the children of Lir, Cú Chulainn, and fairies. She said it was because she saw a lot of my dad in me."

"She'd tell the same stories to Triton," Percy continued. "But he always said it wasn't the same as when dad would tell them. He's the only one who remembers dad, so I always thought he said it just to upset me." Percy licked his lips. "He did always seem to be fascinated by the fae the most though."

"So he wanted you dead, because, what?" Jason asked. "He wanted your mom to himself? That sounds like a weak motive."

"Jealousy is a strong motivator," Percy said. His voice sounded small.

Jason asked, "But why wouldn't the fae take you? Do you really think it was because they didn't know the difference? Or maybe-- They have a thing with breast milk, right? Maybe they wanted your mom because she's had kids."

"Maybe," Percy said, but he didn't sound convinced. A second later his face scrunched up. "Please don't talk about my mom and breast milk in the same sentence."

They kept driving. At one point, Percy reached forward to turn on the radio to keep Jason from falling asleep. They needed to go to the hospital. But they were running out of time. Bryce had said they would never find them.

"Percy," Jason said when they finally pulled up onto the side of the road along the stretch of the woods. The ominous darkness of the trees loomed above them. Jason gazed up at them through the windshield when he asked, "What happens if we don't find them?"

"We'll find them," Percy said quickly.

"Percy," Jason said again. "What if we don't _find_ them?"

Percy cut the engine. There was something truly unsettling about cars at night. It was as if the absence of the sun cast eyes into the back of the vehicle, through the windows, just past the shrubbery. And in the silence of the wagon, Jason felt the hairs on his arms stand up.

"Either we find them," Percy said, "or we get stuck on the other side."

This made Jason's heavy eyes snap up. "We won't be able to get back?"

Percy tapped his thumbs on the wheel in time with his heartbeat. "There's a reason people are warned not to look for the fae. Partially, it's because it's dangerous. And partially, it's because not everyone is able to make it back before the--" He waved a hand, "portal closes."  
  
"Why can't we just open another portal?"

Percy shook his head. "You don't make one. They just… appear. Like the fairy rings. They close again on certain solstices, like Samhain."

"Halloween," Jason clarified. "That's today. Tonight. That's--" He checked his watch. "Percy, that gives us less than an _hour_."  
  
Percy turned and looked at him. Really, _looked_ at him. His jaw was set and his eyes were like fires. In the wilting moonlight just beyond the trees, his strikingly handsome face was almost otherworldly. Jason had never wanted to kiss him so badly.

"I think," Percy said, "you have to decide if you're willing to take the risk to save your sister."

At once, every emotion Jason had felt that year came swimming back to him. The anger, guilt, and grief that threatened his stability every day since his mother's death. The shame, frustration, and exhaustion that pulled at his body every day since he'd been forced to play grown-up with Thalia.

Hadn't he wanted his life back?

Hadn't he wanted to be free?

Jason hesitated.

But only for a moment.

Then his hand reached for the passenger door and swiftly he pulled himself out. The air was fierce with cold and it pierced Jason's skin with promise. He knelt down to look back into the car.

"I think," said Jason, "we better hurry."


	32. leanan sídhe

The air was still and frigid when they reached the fairy rings. Without the wind the trees were rendered alien, their dark limbs reaching out like exposed earthy veins to the sky. Jason found them unnerving to look at, but not so unnerving as Percy standing in the middle of one of the seven stone rings.  
  
Percy was frowning down at the stones, at the mushrooms. He didn't move an inch when Jason stepped in alongside him.

"Should I step on one again?" Jason asked, indicating the tiny pearl-like mushrooms dotting the dead earth.

"I don't think it would do anything," Percy said. "Last time, you were displaced. Remember? Moving one of the mushrooms would only take us to another part of the woods."  
  
Jason checked his watch. Percy let out a slow, slow breath.

"We should have brought Bryce," Percy said.  
  
Jason frowned. He didn't disagree, but he didn't agree either. The last thing they needed when they crossed over to the fairy world was to have the fae's master, if that's what Bryce was, as a hostage.

He thought of the boys Bryce had killed in their stead, the way their blood never touched the floor: a self-contained crime scene. If the fairies could do any of that, they were fucked. But Jason was sure they could. The memory of not-Thalia's incredible speed in the kitchen, the horrific transformation of her body, _screamed_ power.

They were fucked.

At least they were if they could ever get out of Greenwood.

Percy was becoming increasingly frustrated. He'd craned his head back, back, blinding himself on the fierce glow of the moon. His throat was long and wonderful, brown skin tight against his adam's apple.

Jason let his eyes drag over him for one unhurried moment, his thoughts pregnant with dread. This could be the last time he got to see Percy like this. The last time he got to see Percy at all.

Percy brought his head back down and met Jason's eyes, pupils dilating to see him in the vast darkness. They reminded Jason of his sister's, the fairy's in the kitchen, the sudden blackness of her eyes and oh--

"Intention," Jason said.

Percy asked, "What?"

"You said it's all about intention," Jason said. He looked down at the stones, the mushrooms, the trees. "When we did the ritual. What if that's the way to the fairy world too? It isn't enough to stand in the ring."

"We have to make our intentions known," Percy echoed. It was like Jason had lit a match behind his eyes. Once they knew the answer, the act of crossing over wasn't as difficult as they had predicted.  
  
They simply took each other's hands, closed their eyes.

And wanted.

 _Want_ came easily to Jason.

 _Want_ had always been Jason's baseline, the flame under his feet. When he was born into the world he had come out screaming, crying for something no basic need could fulfill. College had meant to scratch the itch he'd felt then, the aching desire for something more that sent him flying across the road in an endless search.

That, perhaps, was the real reason he had hated his sister, hated his _mother_ , so much for forcing him back home. Not because it forced him to grow up, to work in a kitchen. But because it halted his search for that unnameable, thirst-quenching _thing_. He'd convinced himself it had been a career, a location. But holding Percy's hands, here in the moonlight, Jason realized, this entire time, this thing he had been chasing hadn't been a thing.

It'd been love.

"Percy," Jason whispered.

And opened his eyes.

They were standing in the fairy ring, but they were also somewhere else. The woods were dark, but they were heavy with the warmth of spring. The trees were full and spreading. Grass covered the earth around them, untamed, circling the mushrooms of the ring as if they had been there for years.

It was Greenwood, but also _not_ Greenwood.

"It's beautiful," Percy said and Jason was startled to realize he was crying. Or rather, he had been crying and now his eyes were rimmed with pink, his cheeks wet.

The woods were not, in fact, beautiful. But Jason had also never been out in the trees at night for recreational activities outside of monster hunting. He supposed, if he squinted, the world around them could have been fascinating, but he was still overcome with emotion and the strange feeling of warm humidity on his skin in October.

Percy pulled his hands away from Jason's and pulled from his coat pocket the small jar of moss-green fairy mist he'd stolen from Bryce. "The féth fíada," he said, handing the jar to Jason. "It'll let us see the fairies." Even as Percy spoke, his eyes darted around the trees, searching, searching. "And find Thalia." His voice broke. "And mom."

Jason took the lid from the jar. It smelled like earth, but also faintly like rotting fish. Jason gagged on it and shoved it toward Percy. "I'm not putting that shit on," he hissed, covering his nose with his jacket sleeve.

Percy, ever the hero, merely shook his head and took the jar back. To Jason's satisfaction, his nose at least wrinkled as he swept a finger through the cream and brought it to his eye. When it swept over his skin, it went on clear. It was oily and thick. And then it was if nothing was there at all. Percy dipped his finger into the cream again and spread it over his other lid.

His eyes swept the trees again as he handed the jar back to Jason. "We can't let them know we can see them for what they are," Percy warned in a quiet voice. "The fae can take many forms, but if they know you can see them-- Like, _see_ them, they'll--"  
  
Jason didn't hear this last part. As Percy had been speaking, he'd dipped his finger into the horrendous and horrible-smelling cream and smeared it across his right eye. It had been unpleasant to touch, but now more-so that it was on his face.

With a shutter, he felt it cool on his eye and then fade to nothing. He opened his eye, blinked, closed it. Opened his eye, blinked, closed it.

Something.

Was.

Wrong.

With.

Percy's.

Face.

Jason opened his eye.

Percy was there. And he was not there. It was like looking through a pair of old, 3D glasses in a movie theatre and you could see the person on the screen in color, but then there they were again, doubled in blue and then doubled in red, a dizzying copy on a copy on a copy.

Percy's face was his lovely, fierce one. And it was also something stranger, longer. His brain struggled to process it.

Jason closed his right eye. Percy was solid and singular. He'd stopped talking, watching Jason in confusion with his thick eyebrows knitted together.

"Jason?" Percy asked. "What's--"

Jason opened his eyes.

He closed his _left_ eye.

And _screamed_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and so begins the last few chapters  
> also forgive me i can't remember how many rings there were so we're going with seven


	33. the kiss

The creature in front of Jason was every glimpse of the fae he'd caught transformed into something _factual_ and _solid_ and _real_. Its limbs were so very long, its neck _reaching_ , its eyes wide and wild and gaping.

It was every alien documentary Percy had forced him to watch, every dark shadow in the corner of his eye, every terrible feeling crawling along the hairs of his neck embodied in one terrible being.

Jason scrambled to get away, falling into the grass, and was terrified to find the fairy following after him in a way very much _unlike_ not-Thalia. This fairy's legs were awkward and jumbled and it didn't keep its eyes on Jason. Instead, it threw looks over its shoulders until it completely turned around.

"What is it?" the fairy hissed in Percy's voice.

Jason opened his left eye. The fairy was the fairy, but the fairy was also Percy. His right eye showed him a terrible creature's gaunt and dark face and his left eye showed him a beautiful creature's bewildered and fearful one.

"I can't see anything," Percy said and Jason watched from the ground as the boy and the fairy stomped around the woods frantically looking for what Jason had screamed at. Finally, he turned his eyes back to Jason.

Jason flinched. But in the few seconds he had been given this sight, he realized something perhaps more terrible than the truth: Percy didn't know.

Slowly, Jason brought himself to his feet and tried not to pull away when Percy hastily approached. He didn't know what to say. God, what would he even say?

"What was it?" Percy asked and Jason saw his huge dark eyes were somehow just as animated, just as ferocious as his smaller, greener ones. "What did you see?"

Jason took a breath. Then, he said, "You."

He reached for Percy's hand.

And regretted it.

Because Jason hadn't spread the feth fiada onto his left eye, he was made to watch Percy's mind shutter and release, shutter and release as he looked down at his hands -- his long, spindly fingers like something out of Dr. Seuss' nightmares -- and realize--

And _realize_.

At first, Percy tried to throw the image away, but because the image was, in fact, his _hand_ , he couldn't. He extended his arms. He stared at them. And then proceeded to make a sound Jason had never heard Percy make before. It was a low kind of moaning sound, the sound a person made when their tears were gone and all was left was grief.

"Percy," Jason said, his fear finally flagging. He reached for him.

But Percy was beyond his reach. He kept making that awful sound. He tried to bring his hand to his face and then jumped back at his own fingers. And then, slowly, he sank to the forest floor.

Why wouldn't the fae have taken you? Jason had asked him. This was why. Because Percy was already one of them. Percy was a fae, an aos sí.

No.

Percy was not a _fae_ , Jason thought. This fae was _Percy_.

Jason walked toward him, feeling guilt and shame for the scream he had made before. Percy was as crumpled on the ground as a dead leaf. With his right eye, Jason thought he looked strangely beautiful like this. Without the need to be afraid, he could see the elegance in the fairy's long arms, the grace in the fingers, the swan-like curve of the neck, the doe-like eyes. Percy was still formidable, yes, but hadn't he always been?

"Percy," Jason said, again.

Percy didn't look up. He had stopped moaning, but now he was looking out between the trees with a silent horror in his eyes. "Go," he whispered and the trees whispered with him. The softest of breezes touched Jason's cheek. It smelled like spring. "Find Thalia. Get out of here."

"I'm not leaving without you," Jason said. He was a little embarrassed by how desperate it sounded, but he remembered the dull, aching feeling of Greenwood without Percy and he didn't want to go back to that. He had found what he needed, what he wanted, and it was lying in a heap of fettucini limbs in the grass.

"This is where I belong," Percy insisted. His voice was not his own. It was raspy and strangled and awful.

Jason felt his jaw set. He wouldn't leave without Percy. That was a promise.

He grabbed Percy's arms, his chest, and heaved. " _I'm not_ ," he growled through clenched teeth, " _leaving you._ "

Jason managed to pull Percy up against the nearest tree before letting out a shuddering breath. He could feel the tears in his eyes. He let them come. "Everything," he said, "was a nightmare before you came into my life. I don't want to go back there alone."

"But--" Percy began.

"I don't care about what you are," Jason said, "whatever you are. Because whatever you are, you're still _you_. Right? You're telling me you'd give up plants and Bigfoot and your terrible folk music to go on adventures with Peter Pan?"

Percy let out an airy, breathless laugh. They were both crying.

"I love you," Jason said and when he said it he wasn't looking through his left eye. "I want you to move in with me and Thalia. I want to go back to college with you. I want to go on adventures with you. I want to find Sasquatch. _I'm not leaving_."  
  
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breaths and tearful heaving sighs. And then Percy said something Jason didn't catch. He asked, wiping snot from his face with the back of his hand, "What?"

"I said," Percy repeated, swallowing, "you were always my Peter Pan."

What followed was a gentle silence, the kind of silence that could only happen when a human and a changeling shared their first kiss against the trunk of an oak tree on the other side of a world that was not their own.

Jason was the first to speak, his lips still warm from Percy's. He said, "Let's find your mom."


	34. maenads

"We need to hurry," Jason said unnecessarily. Both he and Percy knew they were running out of time.

The forest seemed to go on forever. Jason has assumed it was a mirror of the forest in Greenwood. But Percy seemed to be losing his footing more than usual. Walking in circles more than usual. Guessing which direction to go in more than usual.

The earth sucked at their shoes. The warm air made sweat bead on Jason's arms. Everything was so dark. He could barely see Percy in his new nightmarish body. Percy's long, long limbs made him blend with the trees. His dark, dark eyes were only visible when they bounced red off Jason's flashlight.

It was unnerving. But no more unnerving than Percy had been before.

Just different.

"Do you see anything?" Jason asked.

Percy had been quiet since the discovery of himself by the large oak tree. He stayed close to Jason, his head turning this way and that. Birdlike.

"You look like Mothman," said Jason.

"You look gay," Percy replied. He answered, "I don't see anything. But I think I hear music."

Jason stopped walking. He cupped his hand behind an ear. The wind swept through the trees and sent leaves the leaves whispering. An owl killed a mouse somewhere off to their right.

"You don't hear that?" Percy asked.

Jason looked up at him. Percy was looming over him, his head cocked, neck ducked low. He watched Percy's eyes dance in the dark. Jason strained to listen, but he heard nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And then--

Ah.

 _Something_.

Just there under the faint gasps of the trees, Jason thought he could hear a whistle. It was a tinny sound, like a pipe. It made Jason itch beneath his skin like panic. He felt a little sick. And then he felt it odd that he felt sick. And then he felt _terrible_.

Jason's legs moved of their own accord. He needed to find the noise. Only when he found the noise, he thought, would the terrible feeling stop. His stomach was burning. His limbs felt wrong. Something was climbing in his ears.

Oh.

"Oh," said Jason.

Percy had covered his ears with his long hands.

Jason carefully slid his hands up to his own ears and Percy pulled his own away. He couldn't hear the music anymore, but he could hear Percy's muffled voice: "It's magic. We need to follow it. That's where the fae are."

Jason decided he didn't like magic. But he followed Percy anyway, burying his fingers deeper into his ears the closer they got to the sound.

It was a maddening kind of music. Jason felt himself wincing with every step they took. Percy kept shooting him worried glances. The darkness began to fade. There was light up ahead, just beyond a few trees.

A bonfire.

Jason carefully hid behind one of the darker trees while Percy blended seamlessly with the bushes.

A dozen fae danced around the bonfire to the piping music, laughing and singing in strangely beautiful voices. Many of them were drinking from containers that resembled leaves but also bowls.

Some were kissing. Some were not. Some were on the ground. Some were not.

It was a danse macabre of graceful devils. Dark sparrows dancing around a glowing bath. One sparrow caught Jason's eye. It was Percy. He gestured toward the ground off to Jason's left.

Jason turned.

His breathing stopped.

There was Thalia. She was huddled on the ground. Her face was dirtied and hair in disarray like a wild animal. But she was alive. She had her hands over her ears like Jason. Her face looked twisted in agony.

There was another girl beside her in the same position, her hair matted in clumps as if it had been torn from her head in places. A boy Jason vaguely recognized from the 'missing persons' flyers around Greenwood sat beside them in a mirrored pose.

Jason tried not to look at the others around them.

The other teenagers were not alive.

They were limbs, mostly. Formless. Faceless.

Bile crept up Jason's throat. A part of him, the part of him clawing his hands over his ears at the piping, knew it hadn't been the fae that had torn them apart. It had been each other. It had been the music.

Jason searched for the fae playing the music. He could only see the dancers, the singers, the-- _There_. Up in one of the trees there sat a fae, leg dangling precariously from a branch.

They didn't seem to be playing the pipe directly at the teens below. Instead, the fae looked bored, tired even, leaning back against the tree trunk. Their long fingers danced over the pipe mindlessly, instinctively.

And there.

Just beside them sat Sally Jackson. She looked just as tired at the piper if not more so. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes. Something was covering her ears, an odd paste not unlike the one Jason and Percy had coated their eyes with.

Jason turned and motioned with his elbow to get Percy's attention. He mouthed, 'What do we do?'

Percy gestured toward the fae and then signed with his hands. It was difficult to see what he was saying in the dark, but Jason managed to catch 'Get Thalia. I will distract them.'

Before Jason could protest, Percy flung himself from the bushes. He screeched long and high as if he'd been attacked. Jason didn't wait to see what he was doing. As soon as the music stopped, he tore his hands from his ears and raced to his sister.

Thalia didn't look up at his approach. Her hands were still clutched over her ears, her eyes shut tight. Jason couldn't blame her. The stench and sight of the gore just beside her and the two other teens made Jason gag as he ran toward them.

He nearly slipped in it in his haste. But he managed to avoid a sickening amount of hair before coming to a stop beside Thalia.

Jason touched her arm.

Thalia flinched.

Jason squeezed.

She opened her eyes.

Thalia made a sound that wasn't quite a sob but wasn't quite a breath either. Jason couldn't manage a sound at all. They fell into each other, clawing each other in relief. "You found me," Thalia croaked against his shoulder. Her face was wet.

"I'll always find you," Jason said. He forced himself to pull away. He roughly wiped his cheeks. "Get the others. We need to go."

As Thalia got the attention of the two other teens, Jason looked up to where the fae were hurdling wildly around the bonfire like gnats.

Percy had somehow managed to work them into a panicked frenzy. Several fae had already darted off into the trees like deer. Others were grappling at drink and supplies, trying to gather as much as they could and spilling it all again as they hurried away.

Jason couldn't see Percy himself, but he could hear his screeching in the distance. It sounded like the owl they'd heard earlier, echoed back in a scream.

Jason chanced a look up into the tree where the piping fae had been. The fae was gone now, perhaps having run off into the trees with the others, terrified of some unknown threat.

But Sally Jackson was still in the tree. Her eyes, brown but no less startling as Percy's had been when he had been Percy _before,_ found his in the dark.

Jason checked over his shoulder to make sure Thalia and the other two teens were safe before running over to the tree. The bark was rough against his palms. "Mrs. Jackson," he called up. He reached for her.

Sally scrambled from her branch. She shimmied her way down the tree, her movements strong and sure. When she made it down to the lowest branch, she jumped the rest of the way to the ground and tore the goop away from her ears. Jason tried not to be grossed out by it.

"Where's Percy?" Sally asked, out of breath.

"He's--" Jason began and then stopped as the bushes rustled beside them. Before Jason could make a sound, call a warning, yell, scream, something came from the dark and snatched at Sally's leg.

Sally fell to the ground with an awful snapping sound. She _shrieked_. The fae that had grabbed her continued to pull. Jason recognized it as the same fae that had been in the tree, its pipe still clasped in its long-fingered hand.

The fae bared its gaping mouth at Jason.

Jason barreled his fist into its jaw.

The thing about punching, Jason thought, was that no one told you just how much it hurt to do it.

Jason felt the moment his skin broke against the fae's short, sharp teeth. He hissed, pulling his fist back toward himself as the fae screeched and stumbled back into the grass.   
  
Before it could surge forward again, though, Sally shot her foot forward and stomped her heel into the fae's enormous eyes.

Jason didn't wait for the fae to recover. He grabbed for Sally's arms and dragged her to her feet. She stumbled. Her other foot was twisted at a sickening angle.

Jason slipped her arm around his neck. Together they half-jogged, half-stumbled toward the trees. Thalia and the two others weren't much further ahead, hiding in the dark.   
  
Thalia came to Sally's other side, helping Jason carry her forward.

"We have to get back to the fairy ring," Jason gasped. He could still hear Percy's screeching in the distance, but it was getting fainter.

How much longer did they have before the creatures realized they were escaping? How much longer did they have before the fae recovered?

Not long judging by the sound of the sticks snapping behind them.  
  
Jason urged them faster.

They stumbled over branches. Slid in the dirt. Gasped and choked on the warm, spring air. They weren't going to make it. They weren't going to make it.

And then.

There.

Up ahead.

The soft glow of a ring of white mushrooms.

Jason sobbed, "Go! _Go!_ "

The two teens made it to the ring first. Jason whipped his head behind his shoulder. He couldn't see the fae. "Think of home!" he shouted. "Close your eyes! Think of home!"

The two held close to each other in the fair ring and clenched their eyes tight. Nothing happened. Nothing-- They were there. And then they weren't.

Jason slipped out from beneath Sally's arm. He gently touched Thalia's elbow. "Go," he said.

Thalia shot him a panicked look. "Jason--"

"I'll meet you there," Jason said. "But I have to get Percy."

" _Jason_."

"I have to get Percy. Thalia, close your eyes. Think of-- Think of home. Think of me."

Thalia carefully helped Sally into the fairy ring. When she looked at Jason, her face was open and raw. She said, "Jason, I'm sorry. I never meant for this to happen. It's my fault."

"It's not your fault," Jason said. His throat was tight. "Thalia--"

"You don't get it," Thalia said, shaking her head. "Jason, I started this. I--"

"You didn't start it, Thal, it was Bryce. It was all Bryce."

"He was covering for me. He said he'd tell you if I didn't do what he--"

"Thalia, you need to--"

"I'm the one who hit mom."

Jason stared at her. He heard her. But he hadn't heard her. He said, "No, you didn't."

"I hit her with Bryce's truck," Thalia said. She was crying, her face twisted and ugly. "I hit her. I hit her, Jason, I hit her."

"Thalia."

"I'm not sorry. I'm sorry about this, but not-- not that. I just-- I needed you to know. I needed you to know it was me."

Jason stared at his sister.

He thought of their mom's wild eyes. Her sickly sweet smile. Her two-faced, dangerous words. The way she twisted Thalia's arm when she stayed out too late. The way she didn't tell Jason she loved him when she was angry. The way she went through their things. The way she was always watching. The way she was always watching. The way she was always watching.

"I won't tell anyone," Jason said.

Thalia exhaled.

She closed her eyes.

Sally and Thalia disappeared.

And then

something

grabbed

Jason

from

behind.

 

**

 

Jason wasn't proud of the sound that came from his mouth.

But he _was_ relieved to find the fae that had grabbed him from behind had more doe-like eyes, a more bird-like neck, a more wild look than the others. He stammered, " _Percy_."

"Are they safe?" Percy gasped. His chest was heaving. How far had he run?

"Yes," Jason said. "We need to leave. It's almost midnight. And there's a--"

Leaves rustled. A branch snapped.

Both Percy and Jason tensed, watching the trees. "Go," Percy whispered.

Jason shot him a look. He hissed, "I'm not leaving without you."

"You don't have a choice. I'm the only one who can hold them off."

"Don't you pull this sacrificial shit with me, mothboy."

"Jason--"  
  
"I'm not--"

In retrospect, Jason found it odd how unnatural the gunshot sounded in a place where he had just witnessed a fairy's magical pipe bring everyday people to rage. But there it was, plain as day, a gunshot in a supernatural forest. A gunshot that sent Percy jerking backward and down to the ground.

A branch snapped. Bushes rustled. A gun cocked again. Percy gasped from the ground. A bullet had grazed his arm and took a chunk of flesh with it. Jason felt nauseous seeing his blood. It was too much in one night. Too much in one week. Too much.

"You don't know when to _fucking_ die, do you?"

Percy shuddered on the ground, his face as twisted as Thalia's had been. He sputtered, " _Triton?_ "

Where Jason had expected the fae to come tearing from the bushes, Triton stood instead. Twigs and leaves were in his hair, his uniform torn from the trees. The gun in his hand was very real and very dark and pointed directly at Percy.

Percy choked, "Triton, what are you doing?"

"Didn't Bryce already tell you?" Triton asked. He snorted. "That dumb bastard couldn't carry out a plan if I handed to him. Which I did. Now stay still. I don't want to miss again."

"I'm your brother!"

"You're not even human."

The shattered look in Percy's eyes was worse than seeing his blood.

Triton pointed the gun from his chest to his face. "Thanks for getting mom back for me. Tragic that the fae got you before you could make it back."

Triton fired the gun.

But the bullet didn't hit Percy.

This wasn't because Triton aimed wrong. Or because Jason had leaped in front of Percy. But because the fae that had been chasing them had chosen that moment to tear out from the darkness and latch it's terribly long limbs around Triton's body.

Triton swore.

He swore again.

The fae let out an awful sound. Its mouth was bloody from where Jason had punched it. Its eye was misshapen from where Sally had kicked it. It drew its long, long arm back and swept down across Triton's face. Then again. And again.

Triton wasn't quiet. His screams were an animal's shrieks.

Jason didn't help him.

He dragged Percy up.

Percy stumbled.

Jason pulled him to the fairy ring. He didn't have to tell Percy to close his eyes. They thought of home. Of Greenwood. Of each other. Of home.

Home.

Home.

Home.

" _Percy!_ "

Home.  
  
Home.

" _Percy!_ "

Home.

Percy gripped Jason's sleeve. Jason pulled him close.

 _Home_.


	35. epilogue

Greenwood, NY was known for its lack of everything – its lack of natural disasters, its lack of entertainment, and most of all its lack of population.   
  
Nothing ever happened in Greenwood.

Which was why it was so exciting when Percy Jackson made something happen.

Jason Grace had just finished his shift at Marty's when his boyfriend's creaky, old van pulled up into the parking lot. Jason watched Percy clamor out of the van, his eyes alight with fire.

Jason smiled.

Since their return to Greenwood, Percy had moved out of his camper and back in with his mom in a small apartment only 15 minutes down the road from the Grace ranch. As it turned out, Percy hadn't replaced a human child after all. Percy's father just hadn't been as human as Sally had made him out to be.

Thalia hadn't been able to graduate with the rest of her class due to missing too much school, but she was making up her work over the summer. She didn't want to go to college. Jason wouldn't make her. But she would be moving out of the ranch to head out on the road with Annabeth for the rest of the summer.

Which meant the ranch was left open for Jason and Percy.

Well, and Jupiter.

"You're never going to guess what I found," Percy said as he approached, holding up his phone screen.

Since Jason had washed the feth fiada from his eyes, Percy looked as human as he had before. But there still something about the way he moved that wasn't quite so normal. Jason was fine with that. In fact, he liked it. Kind of a lot.

"Is that a footprint?" Jason asked, blinking down at the phone screen.

"That's a Squatch print," said Percy. He was grinning.

"Jason Grace," he began.

"Oh, god," said Jason.

"Ready for an adventure?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [holding the last chapter] you want it?? go get it! STREET SMARTS


End file.
